Word: friedkins
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...UGLINESS of The Exorcist (directed by William Friedkin) is calculated for cheap thrills. It pounds at you mechanically with the punch of a tank. It soaks below the conscious level into the bloodstream and anesthetizes feeling. Senseless in its conception, emptied of anything to care about, the movie does its dirty work on the stomach and the nerves. And, down deeper, it can cast your world into a limbo of doubt...
...lucky that nobody studies the rest of the movie. Because there is nothing to it--it is all mindless filler, padding to launch the action. The movie's high is in the special effects that ran up the movie's budget from 4 to 10 million dollars as Friedkin kept mashing up more vomit effects into his vomit movie. He must have gotten carried away, which is lucky for the investors. What a good gamble they made, those wizards, when they guessed that people would want to get sick at the movies. Maybe they noticed that people also stock...
SATURDAY: The Night They Raided Minsky's. 1967. Bert (Cowardly Lion) Lahr's last film role--Elliott Gould's first. Directed by William Friedkin who went on to "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist," this musical farce is a nostalgic look at the twenties burlesques. CH. 4. 9 p.m. Color...
...metaphors ("the Kurd stood waiting like an ancient debt"). A famous movie star (Ellen Burstyn) and her daughter are on location in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., when the daughter is possessed by a raging demon-the Devil himself. To depict the permutations of this evil spirit, Director Friedkin and Writer Blatty go in for cheap shocks and crude novelty. There are gruesome details of an encephalogram being taken on the girl in search of some physical origin for her symptoms; there are also scenes showing her genitals being maimed with a crucifix, copious vomiting, a cacophony of obscenities...
...Friedkin and Blatty seem to care nothing for their characters as people, only as victims-props to be abused, hurled about the room, beaten and, in one case, brutally murdered...