n 1949, archaeologist Lankester Merrin (Skarsgård) finds himself in a seedy bar in Cairo, when the mysterious Semelier (Ben Cross) offers him money in exchange for a strange mission: to find a relic in a newly discovered fifth-century Christian church buried in the wilds of Turkana in Kenya. Not possible, Merrin says. Christianity didn't even make it that far by then. He should know: He was once a priest, before he lost his faith during World War II in his native Holland.
And yet it is there, Semelier says. He shows Merrin the impression of a Sumerian figure, which catches Merrin's interest. He agrees to go.
In Nairobi, Merrin meets Father Francis (D'Arcy), an eager young priest who will accompany Merrin to Kenya to investigate the dig. Upon arrival in the small Kenyan village near the dig site, Merrin meets Jefferies (Alan Ford), the scrofulous supervisor of the dig, and the toothsome Dr. Sarah Novack, a physician who runs the local hospital.
At the dig site, Merrin finds the dome of a Byzantine church buried in the sands, but in remarkable condition, as if it were interred just after it was built. Descending through the roof, Merrin and Francis find an even stranger sight: a sanctuary not designed to exalt heaven, but focused earthward, on a crypt in the center.
Back in the village, strange things have been taking place, and a local boy, Joseph (Remy Sweeney), has been acting oddly. Then there's the hyenas, who have been keeping weird hours. Not to mention the graves just outside town, where a plague killed everyone a century earlier. And why are the local tribesmen so afraid to go near the old church?
The Exorcist curse continues
The curse upon the Exorcist franchise culminates in this misbegotten prequel to the classic 1973 supernatural horror movie The Exorcist. Famously reshot by actionmeister Harlin (Cliffhanger) after a more psychological version from auteur Paul Schrader was scrapped, this movie is all noise, flash, gore and cheap scares, with a squandered performance by the excellent Skarsgård and a plot that is so free of logic it makes the head spin.
Harlin has been quoted as saying that Morgan Creek wasn't going for a more visceral film with his version, but a viewing quickly puts the lie to that assertion. Harlin and tyro scripter Hawley have taken the intriguing premise of Alienist author Carr —about Merrin's crisis of faith—and stripped it of all possible complexity in favor of buckets of blood, maggots, rotting corpses, eviscerations, stabbings, shootings, body parts and an attack by a pack of ravening hyenas. The film may not have the twisting heads or green vomit of the original Exorcist, but neither does it have the sense of reality or character that provided the crucial context that made the first movie so chilling.
Instead, Harlin has cobbled together an overly stylized movie that is part Indiana Jones and part Amityville Horror, with a bit of Zulu thrown in, one surmises, simply as an excuse to fire machine guns. The dialogue is obligatory and laughably flatfooted: At one point, Merrin explains his loss of faith by saying, "I wanted to work with something real, something I could touch with my hands," all while he's ogling Scorupco's cleavage.
Harlin also directs like a man possessed: He has no patience with his characters or story, cutting so quickly that all sense of rhythm and suspense dissipates. In their place he offers up one horror movie cliche after another, up to and including a scene with Scorupco naked in a shower when the lights go out.
