The Exorcist [Blu-ray] [1973] [Region Free]

When you are so deeply passionate about films, your search for the greatest ever movie is always changing, but for me, The Exorcist is the film I always come back to. I like to describe the film as "pure cinema", in that it does everything a film is meant to do, which is to comletely transport you for the two or so hours and to take you on an emotional, engaging and magical journey.
To me, the film is very much an epic. However, not in the sense of huge sweeping shots and hundreds of extas, Lawrence of Arabia stlye (another fantastic film by the way) but in the sense of subject matter. There are many films themed around good versus evil but never has there been one so deeply religiously rooted, which is why I believe it is the most epic kind of a story you can tell. I am not a religious person at all, but I find the subject to be extremely interesting cinematically, and for those 115 minutes or so, I was a believer!
The plot is simple: Young girl gradually becomes possessed by a demon and the exorcist is called in to drive out the evil spirit. The film is full of magical movie moments such as the rotating head, the levitation and lets not forget one of the most visually striking shots in film history: father Merrin lit by the eerie shaft of light coming from the Mackneil second floor window. I believe a large portion of the films success is due to William Friedkin's direction. He brought a sense of realism to the film which is exactly what it needed, but, at the same time, keeping it a "movie" movie. This is the genius of The Exorcist.
There are some great extra features on the dvd, the best of these being "The Fear of God" documentary. I was dissapointed with the two sequels, but let's hope the fourth will be better. For the meantime however, the greatest film of all time time will do!

The Exorcist - The Version You've Never Seen is also the version you probably shouldn't have, adding almost nothing to a fine original but running time, some clumsy additional `subliminal' images digitally grafted on with all the subtlety of a 1980s New Romantic music video and a poor new sound mix that adds music cues and sound effects far less effective than the original mix. Most of the restored footage is taken up by an extended additional medical tests sequence that feels a little out of place since Regan hasn't been acting particularly oddly at that point in the film, as well as the odd bit of padding in the run-up to the exorcism and a redundant scene of Karras listening to a tape recording of a pre-possession Regan. Worst of the new additions by far is the infamous spider walk, a scene abandoned during shooting and here accounting for two rather laughable shots that take the film too far too soon. Other additions are somewhat more esoteric - a brief pretitle shot of the Georgetown house and street, Father Dyer keeping the St Christopher at the end after Chris hands it back and the disastrous addition of a screeching airplane sound effect in the segue from Iraq to Georgetown that makes you think Pazuzu must have travelled to Washington by Pan-Am (although this does echo Lalo Schifrin's far more effective rejected scoring for the sequence). What's most curious is what's still missing: despite including the weak Hollywood ending with Kinderman and Father Dyer, the exchange with Chris over whether she still doesn't believe in God is gone. The big bone of contention between Blatty and Friedkin, the idea that if you believe in the Devil because of all the terrible things that happen, you must also believe in a God even if he, unlike the horned one, doesn't advertise, seems the only justification for extending the section at all, but as if to spite the writer it's still pointedly removed. Only the brief discussion about the Devil's motives for possessing Regan in a break in the exorcism feels like it adds any substance to the proceedings (although it could be said the possession is more disturbingly arbitrary if left unexplained), the rest being motivated purely by the need for a marketing hook to secure a US reissue.

The end result is a film that feels much longer and slower but still eventually grips. Aside from the overlength, the strengths and weaknesses are much the same: the at times almost documentary style of film-making grounds the events in a recognisable real world, the shock effects are fairly sparingly used and only after a long build-up, the characters well-drawn and their despair convincing: the real horror in the film doesn't reside in its special effects or horrific set pieces, but in a mother's anguish over being powerless to help her child.

Few extras, but the widescreen transfer is good.

I'm not going to review the film. We all now it's the paragon of horror cinema. I simply want to tell that I didn't know that an enhancement of picture and sound quality can actually increase the scare factor of a movie. That's exactly what I experienced with this BD release of THE EXORCIST. The first thing I watched when receiving it was the documentary 'Raising Hell: Filming The Exorcist'. The interesting never before seen on-set filming footage (the quality of which is, understandably, at times below standard) is interspersed with Hi-Def shots of the film itself. Seeing these brief high quality flashes made it feel as though I was really there, witnessing an actual event, registering reality, a truly unsettling experience. This BD release of THE EXORCIST is indeed, as stated, `a must-own for any Hi-Def collector', containing both versions (I personally think the original theatrical version is still the best), with a whole range of interesting extras and comments. This is what any high quality horror film fan deserves.