Writer-director Bob Logan somehow managed in 1990 to persuade Linda Blair back to her most famous moment and she gleefully sends up both herself and The Exorcist (1973) movie that once made her world renowned.

Alas, this is a fatuously childish, tawdry and smutty spoof. But, game for it all, Blair is funny as Nancy Aglet, the woman repossessed after her childhood exorcism, and so is an equally game Leslie Nielsen, in an ideal role for the reliable funnyman as the Max von Sydow-style exorcist, Father Jebedaiah Mayii.

Also the premise is fine, but writer-director Logan doesn’t deliver the comedy goods or the laughs. The sideplot with Ned Beatty (who had a role in the 1977 Exorcist II: The Heretic) as a TV revivalist preacher called Ernest Weller (sending up the televangelist Jim Bakker...

Co-writer/ director Scott Derrickson’s scary, well-crafted and literate 2005 American legal drama horror film, loosely based on a true story about Anneliese Michel, won the 2005 Saturn Award for Best Horror or Thriller Film and in 2006 was named in the Chicago Film Critics Association’s list of the Top 100 Scariest Films Ever Made.

It follows the story of agnostic lawyer Erin Bruner (Laura Linney) who acts as defence counsel for parish priest Father Moore (Tom Wilkinson), accused by the state of negligent homicide after he performed an exorcism in which 19-year-old Emily Rose dies.

Paul Harris Boardman is co-writer of the thoughtful and intelligent screenplay. Linney and Wilkinson are ideally cast and give the kind of high quality performance expected of them...

Oscar-winning writer William Peter Blatty’s belated 1990 sequel (as both writer and director this time) to his 1973 blockbuster The Exorcist is advertised as ‘from the creator of the original Exorcist’. That’s to distance itself from the failed second movie, John Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic, which didn’t involve Blatty.

George C Scott stars as Lieutenant William Kinderman, the Georgetown, near Washington DC, police detective (taking over from Lee J Cobb [who died in 1976] in the original), this time investigating a series of eerie murders after a demon has cast himself into the body of a young priest...

Director John Boorman’s 1977 Exorcist sequel doesn’t lack star power with Richard Burton and Louise Fletcher adding to the return of Linda Blair as little Regan MacNeil and Max von Sydow as Father Lankaster Merrin. But director Boorman messes up this troubled sequel, most people’s least favourite Exorcist movie.

It’s four years on from the events of the first film. Understandably, Burton and Fletcher look rather glum and gloomy as Father Lamont, the priest and child psychiatrist whose unhappy task it is to have a second go at freeing little Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) of the demon spirits that she was supposedly exorcised from in 1973.

It’s true that a creepy atmosphere and some scares ensue, but director Boorman doesn’t seem any happier than his stars with the dour material, tryi...

Director Stuart Rosenberg’s surprise blockbuster 1979 horror movie The Amityville Horror recycles the old, old haunted house story once more. It has been used over and over again and yet it is popular every time.

James Brolin and Margot Kidder play this movie’s terrorised couple, newlyweds George and Kathy Lutz, who move into a spooky large old lakefront Dutch Colonial house in Amityville on the coast of Long Island, New York, with their three children — sons Matthew (Meeno Peluce) and Gregory (K C Martel) and daughter Amy (Natasha Ryan). They think that it is their dream home in the ‘deal of a lifetime’ and don’t heed the info the real estate agent tells them about the house’s history: the son of the previous owner shot and killed his parents and four siblings (the DeFeo murders)...

Heath Ledger comes a cropper as Catholic priest Father Alex Bernier dispatched to the Vatican to probe the death of head of his arcane order of priests known as Carolingians. He tracks the mysterious circumstances down to William Eden, The Sin Eater (Benno Fürmann).

Ledger is miscast in this curiously uninvolving and none too convincing 2003 mix of horror, mystery and thriller, only partly stirred up by  Brian Helgeland, the star’s writer-director on their much more successful A Knight’s Tale.

That movie also co-starred Mark Addy and Shannyn Sossamon, who here play Father Alex’s old comrade Father Thomas and a troubled artist he once performed an exorcism on. Peter Weller also stars as Driscoll.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2127

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The grim news in that director Terry Gilliam’s 2005 movie is not a fairy tale success, though Matt Damon and Heath Ledger are extremely game and likeable as the real-life tall story-telling brothers, Will and Jake Grimm (even if it’s unclear why the American and the Aussie are attempting Brit accents though playing Germans).

On the other hand, Brit actor Jonathan Pryce is playing the French villain Delatombe (very badly, ripely and fruitily) and Swedish actor Peter Stormare is playing the Italian baddie-turned-goodie Cavaldi (very badly, ripely and fruitily).

It’s Germany in 1812, and the French overrun the country...