You know something has gone very wrong when the follow-up to a horror movie that left cinemagoers so traumatized they needed medical attention instead leaves them rolling in the aisles with laughter. “You’d think we were watching The Producers,” remarked William Friedkin, director of the original Exorcist, after Exorcist II: The Heretic’s 1977 New York premiere. Four decades later, he’d stick the knife in even further by describing it as “the worst piece of shit I’d ever seen.”
