"What an excellent day for an exorcism"

Rating: 9/10 (17 August 2001)

Having grown up on a staple diet of Freddy Kruger, Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers as a youngster, by the time all three of these franchises had come to their end, they had become so laughably bad the horror genre seemed to have lost its ability to scare the living daylights out of us, and NO!!!, not with boo scares but actual pure psychological terror.... yes, pure evil.
As a youngster I never caught The Exorcist, as in South Africa it was banned until late 1994, and then still released in a cut form. When I eventually did get my hands on a copy, I remember I couldn't sleep for nights afterwards, it had left something deep inside the back of my mind that made me cringe and shudder each time I thought about it.
With great glee, I was one of the many who lined up to see the 2000 version, The version you have never seen before. With its digitally altered shots and its newly revised 5.1 soundtrack, this film still remains a visual tour de force. As a pure study of evil, nothing comes remotely close to this Grandad of horror films. As I sat through the film I couldn't believe that this had come from 1973. The film makers really took a risk in putting this vision onto celluloid, and thank God they did. I keep finding more and more so, that fewer film makers of late have that courage of their convictions when it comes to getting something told, but I suspect those niggly little studio heads grubby fingers are ruining almost everything we see today.
Acting from Burystn, Sydow, Blair and Miller is all top notch, and the film rightfully earned those 10 Oscar nominations. Its being hailed as the scariest movie ever, personally I wouldn't classify it as such as this film is in a class of its own. It will be a long time coming before I see a film as remotely powerful as this, stand the test of time.