IT'S A WONDERFULL LIFE!

 

The Exorcist 3 is a slice of pitch black cinema, of smothering atmospheric horror from which there is no salvation; completely unrepentant and unflinching in its delivery.  It’s heavy stuff and there is no silver lining.  The characters are all doomed, battling for their very souls, and the devil is winning. 

I first saw Exorcist 3 as a young boy; bless HBO and its late night excursions into horror.  It shook me to the core.  Like a bad memory I buried it and left the grave unmarked in my mind.  I could only remember images from the movie but not the name or context.  I could remember a woman walking on the ceiling like a fly, unnoticed by the people below.  I remember a long shot of a hallway, and a killer with large scissors pursuing a young orderly.  I remember a prisoner in a cell, a dark man with a voice like nails on a chalkboard, and a feeling of all consuming dread.   

Years later I rediscovered the horror.  From the first shot, with the slow “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh” of helicopter blades and the camera scrawl over a quant New England town, I felt myself once again fall in step with the cadence of horror to come.  There is a cacophony of wails, images of a church steeple, doors violently fly open; my intestines tighten like a rope.  The Gemini killer is loose on the streets of this quant New England town, preying on innocence, perfecting his craft.  At the center of it all is a detective struggling with the evil of this world, questioning his faith, questioning how a dead man came back to life in a blasphemous mockery of Jesus’ resurrection.  There’s a voice over “I dreamed….I fell down a long flight of stairs…”; on the surface it’s a reference to the first Exorcist and Damien’s death, but I can’t help but mull over whether this is a statement directed more towards the viewer and the symbolic journey they are about to take into the heart of evil, down the stairway to hell.  And that’s precisely what this movie is; a long descent into darkness, one that I make many times a year.

IT’S A WONDERFULL LIFE!

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Check it out...a first look at THE COLLECTION...it's not much but I'm jazzed.