Director : Renny Harlin Starring : Stellan Skarsgård, Gabriel Mann, Billy Crawford

Somebody obviously did their homework on Exorcist: The Beginning, as the movie is filled with a few nice grace notes (and not a few clunky ones) that recall details from the original film, but overall this turgid prequel plays more like Indiana Merrin and the Devil of Doom. By making its titular hero a rugged anthropologist in post-war Africa, haunted by images of Nazis, the film can't help but conjure up visions of Harrison Ford racing down desert hillsides in Raiders of the Lost Ark and facing down all that icky opening-of-the-Ark stuff. Therefore, any attempts at seriousness are already batted aside, even before the cheap, manipulative scares come into play. And man, are these scares cheap – any cheaper and you'd think they'd been bought wholesale.

Much hue and cry has attended the making of Exorcist: The Beginning, with director Paul Schrader's original version -- said to focus on crises of faith and such, minus the gore and scares – tossed out whole in favor of a new, rewritten version directed by the action and peril-friendly Renny Harlin. One imagines it's a toss-up as to which version would be more uncomfortable to sit through. With Schrader, you can just imagine having to wade through numerous lapsed-Catholic philosophical harangues; with Harlin, though, all thoughtfulness is tossed out the door and the bloody special effects are ladled on. Seeing the final result does make you wonder what a better movie would have been like, though that thought will be quickly replaced by the bigger question of why this movie was made at all.

While the original Exorcist certainly tapped a nerve with moviegoers who still to this day are freaked out by the mere memory (and sound) of young Regan MacNeil doing a 360 with her head, the two attempts at sequels have been the definition of misbegotten cinema. Unfortunately, Harlin brings in a little too much of the African backstory that filled up much of Exorcist II: The Heretic's notoriously campy plot. A man of the cloth who's witnessed Nazi atrocities first-hand, Father Merrin (Stellan Skarsgard) has decamped to Cairo and given up his religion and his God. Approached by a shady businessman, he's asked to go help excavate a church in Kenya – one that apparently was built 1000 years before Christianity hit the area, and is in pristine condition to boot. After brushing a few tiles and realizing yes, this is something special, Merrin also takes note of the wacky goings-on at the dig: natives and colonists alike are going crazy, workmen disappear at random, there are lots of CGI flies and hyenas, and crosses tend to turn upside-down at will. A previous archaeologist went insane a while back, and soon, a young native boy comes down with a bad case of the Regan MacNeils (lesions, convulsions, eye-rolling, bed shaking, etc). Oops, looks like the unearthed church was built on top of the site where maybe Lucifer actually fell to earth, and trouble is definitely a-brewing.

The first half of Exorcist: The Beginning is appropriately edgy, though it's filled with enough manipulative scare tactics (including many uses of the first-tiny-scare, second-bigger-scare routine) that after a while it's more irritating than suspenseful. It doesn't help that Merrin is basically a standard horror-movie heroine in male archaeologist drag; he's the kind of guy who'll go into a creepy old devil-worshipping church alone, with nothing to defend himself, and decides later on to dig up graves just as night is beginning to fall (alone, also). But the horror clichés soon give way to some egregiously gross violence, especially involving children, that will just put you off your popcorn in a big, nasty way.

And all the echoes of the original film, from small details like the pendulum clock that stops ticking to the comely Izabella Scorupco re-enacting Ellen Burstyn's suspenseful attic explorations (this time in a hospital), soon give way to the biggest, dumbest echo of all: the return of the Mercedes McCambridge-style demon, who's feeling possessive in a big way. Up until the last twenty minutes or so, it seems like Merrin might actually avoid a confrontation with the profane, bad-breath Devil (or is it Lucifer? Satan? Pazuzu? Isuzu?), but alas, no such luck is to be had. When finally face-to-face with him/her/it, the movie finally tips over into true cringe-inducing territory (though a bad guy's butterfly collection springing to life is also a nice cheesy touch), and all the profane sexual utterances are more stupid than shocking. Credit should go to Skarsgard for keeping a straight face through it all, though one imagines him picturing a big paycheck when looking into the face of evil itself.