- Directors: John Boorman, Rospo Pallenberg
- Writer: William Goodhart
- Stars: Richard Burton, Linda Blair, Louise Fletcher
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 57 Minutes
- Link: https://amzn.to/3fvGtpd
Synopsis
Father Lamont is an exorcist, and he knew Father Merrin from the first film. It goes badly, and the woman burns to death.
We cut to Regan, who is now a normal-seeming teenager. She sees Dr. Tuskin because her mother wants her to go. She still doesn’t remember what happened when she was younger. The doctor wants to hypnotize Regan.
Father Lamont doesn’t want to have anything to do with another exorcism, but the Cardinal wants him to do an investigation. Merrin is being more and more discredited due to some his more radical beliefs and the way he died. Lamont has no choice but to comply; soon we see him interviewing Dr. Tuskin about Regan. Tuskin believes that Regan feels repressed guilt over the three deaths in the first film. Tuskin and Lamont have a bit of a disagreement about what ails Regan.
Dr. Tuskin wires her up to the EEG and starts the hypnosis process with Father Lamont observing. They take her back in her mind to their time in Washington. Dr. Tuskin is hooked to the machine as well, and she can see what happened. Lamont asks questions about Father Mirren, and Tuskin doesn’t handle it well. Lamont goes into the machine to rescue Tuskin and he gets to see Mirren’s final moments. They are all eventually OK.
Regan draws a picture of Lamont in front of a fire which he doesn’t take well. “There’s a fire somewhere,” he says, and they soon find a fire just beginning in the basement. Soon, Lamont is completely onboard with her machine, and he’s fascinated. He wants to connect to Regan through the machine tomorrow.
That night, Regan’s voices start again. She dreams of Africans calling locusts. Meanwhile, she’s sleepwalking on the roof of her building. Lamont and Sharon return to the house where the first film happened, which is now covered in barbed wire. They go inside and talk. Lamont wonders, “Does great goodness draw evil upon itself?”
Finally Lamont and Regan get hooked up in the mind-meld machine. He, too, can see the African and locusts, and Merrin was there to witness all of it. The locust boy says “I am Pazuzu.” We then get a full flashback to Pazuzu’s exorcism via Merrin. The locust-boy has since grown up, and his name is Kokuma. This causes an argument between Lamont and Tuskin over faith versus science.
Lamont decides he needs to track down Kokuma, but the Cardinal not only refuses, but takes him off the case. Naturally, Lamont goes on his own to what has to be the most hard-to-reach place in Africa. He finally find Kokuma, a tribal native who goes around dressed like a giant Locust. He makes Lamont walk across a bunch of nails. Suddenly, Kokuma is a scientist who studies locusts in his lab. Somehow, the locusts have something to do with Pazuzu, and there’s a “good locust,” but it’s all a little too boring to follow by this point.
Back in civilization, Regan does a tap-dancing show, which Pazuzu doesn’t enjoy; he gives her convulsions in the middle of the big scene. She steals the synchronizer and runs away from the hospital, but Lamont finds her at the museum. They go to his skeezy apartment and hook themselves to the machine. Father Merrin shows up in a vision and passes the torch to Lamont. Pazuzu then possesses Lamont, who then buys bus tickets to Washington; he plans to go back to the original house where Merrin died. Tuskin and Sharon pursue by plane.
Lamont and Regan arrive at the house first, and he goes up to Regan’s room. He’s attacked by a million locusts, and the cab with Sharon and Tuskin crash right into the from door of the place. Suddenly, Sharon is possessed and won’t let Tuskin inside, but she burns to death for plot reasons. Pazuzu orders Lamont to kill Regan, but he overcomes it and attacks Pazuzu. Meanwhile, a cloud of locusts appear over the city. Lamont attacks Pazuzu, and locusts attack everybody. The house starts to fall apart, and there’s lots of screaming.
The happy music starts to play as Regan does the happy-locust-rodeo-thing, and everyone is suddenly fine except Sharon who is still burned to a crisp.
Commentary
The mind-meld machine is just bad science fiction and really hurt the film. Possession and demons are hard to believe in themselves, but that’s OK in a horror film. But then added this kind of completely made up technology pushes suspension of disbelief too far.
Many of the African sets looked a little too sound-stagey, much like one of the alien planets from the original Star Trek. All the African scenes are just interminably long and uninteresting. How hard could it be to find a guy name Kokuma in a mud hut somewhere in Africa, anyway?
There’s just too much focus on things that have nothing to do with the story. There’s too much Africa. There’s too many locusts. At the end there was one Regan and one Pazuzu, somehow in separate bodies. None of this is interesting in any way.
This is just a horrible, horrible sequel in every imaginable way. What were they thinking?