Word: deviling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Twelve-year-old creamy-skinned, apple-cheeked Regan (Linda Blair), daughter of a famous actress divorcee (Ellen Burstyn) living in the heart of Georgetown society, is possessed mind and body by the devil. Her face grows bloated, crossed by pusfilled lesions; her eyes become cat's orbs that crawl back in her head; her skin swells and turns a swamp color; her hair gets sticky and snaky; her voice comes out the croak of a just-cured male mute; convulsions contort her body and it flips like a wounded crocodile's tail; she drools green gook when...
...Roman Catholic priests, the movie broadcasts the superior power of the Catholic Church to rid the world of evil. The Church must be running out of devout. Still exorcism is spare stuff for so heavy a message, especially when it is left at loose ends. The history of the devil spirit, for all the attention he gets, is a mystery. You don't know why the devil picked on little Regan. You don't konw why the two priests die. You don't even get told how an exorcism works. It's a shoddy movie...
...conspiracy of sinister unknowns; it is out of joint, gone haywire, batty. The primacy of the exorcism plants confusion and doubt everywhere. People are slaughtercalves of the powerful and the powerful cannot be identified. Nothing can be known for sure, nothing can be taken on faith, for the devil travels in disguise. It's life as hallucination...
...doctors, cops, shrinks and priests, guardians of the public health, safety and conscience, she defiles. Little Regan, this bright-eyed and blossomed-cheeked twelve-year-old darling, terrifies and tells off the whole straight, established, grown-up world of the movie. She is a hell's angel and a devil's child, a naughty devil at that. She is also a she-devil, splurging on all the forbidden fantasies: from the bloody masturbation with the crucifix to the near murder of the mother, she de-eroticizes sex Little Regan, moreover, an innocent possessed, is free to do the forbidden...
Although the pornographic films I've seen thus far, both hard and soft core, have been quite boring to me, this need not always be the case. Somewhere between the extremes of Last Tango in Paris and The Devil in Miss Jones lies a vast, as yet untapped potential for quality erotic cinema. However, it is not because of this that I am vigorously on the side of the civil libertarians. Intrinsic to most censorship arguments is the supposition that the putative censors are morally superior to pornography's patrons. It is a form of elitism, as dogmatic and offensive...