Exorcist: The Beginning review

It's been 31 years since The Exorcist frightened a generation of film-goers and in the process, brought a new credibility to the horror genre with 10 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. In the intervening years there have been two attempts to follow up the brilliance of director William Friedkin's take on William Peter Blatty's chilling novel about a 12-year-old girl possessed by the devil. Both failed miserably, but that hasn't deterred this latest effort. Nor the fact that Paul Schrader's completed version was all but scrapped and Renny Harlin hired to shoot a new account.

Apparently Schrader's version lacked the requisite blood and gore, and while Harlin's Exorcist: The Beginning contains its fair share, it's certainly not in abundance. What is lacking, though, is a decent story. One of the original Exorcist's most chilling aspects was that it involved real people in an everyday setting, elements that are always starkly more frightening than a horror tale set in some imaginary world with unrecognizable characters.

Although E:TB features Father Lancaster Merrin - with Stellan Skarsgård in the role made famous by Max von Sydow - the action is set in a remote part of Africa, where the arid landscape, along with the film's archeological thread, conjures up comparisons with The Mummy. E:TB is certainly closer in spirit to The Mummy, with its more fantastical brand of horror, than the original Exorcist.

Merrin first appears in Cairo in 1949, where he's plying his trade as an archeologist and looking not unlike Indiana Jones. His wartime encounters with Nazi atrocities have caused him to renounce his faith and suffer vivid flashbacks. He is approached to recover an ancient relic from a recently uncovered Byzantine church in Turkana, Kenya. That the church was reportedly built a thousand years before Christianity arrived in the region is but one of the many mysteries surrounding the church. When Merrin arrives, he finds the local villagers scared of the church, the excavation of which has brought with it a plague of death and sickness.

Merrin's efforts to uncover the source of the church's supposed curse involve a beautiful doctor (Izabella Scorupco), a Vatican priest Father Francis (James D'Arcy) and a young boy Joseph (Remy Sweeny). What follows includes plenty of heavy-handed symbolism, dark lighting, creaking doors and spooky music, all of which constitute the usual array of tricks relied upon to scare people when the story itself doesn't.

Merrin is undoubtedly an enigmatic character and Skarsgård a riveting actor, but in this torpid tale, their presence is not enough. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro does his best to add some style, but even his efforts can't alter the fact the film is more inclined to solicit laughter than shivers. The hokey special effects of the original still appear more effective than the sophisticated computer tricks used here (especially the clunky hyaenas).

If it achieves anything other than provide diehard horror fans with two hours of anticipation as they wait forlornly to be spooked, it will perhaps mark the final episode in the fright franchise. If it does achieve this, it should, as one eminent critical wag put it, be renamed Exorcist: The End.