The Exorcist III: Cries and Shadows (1975)

Okey, I’m silly with keeping this title, The Exorcist III: Cries and Shadows, but it’s a helluva lot more fun than Naked Exorcism or The Last Exorcist, and I never cared of using the original title if there’s an English to use. Using the original title is more of a way to say “Hey, I know better than all of you and I just copied the title from IMDB anyway because I can hardly spell to my own name”. You know the people doing this, so I refuse to be one of those. This is a very crude cash-in on The Exorcist, with very little finesse but still a few fun ideas here and there.

A teenager boy, Piero (Jean-Claude Vernè) photographs – he think – a naked woman at a lake. But the negatives reveal nothing. This could just be a spooky thing, easily forgotten, if it wasn’t for Piero getting stranger and stranger. He sees visions of orgies, satanic rituals and the same woman. His mother encounters the woman several times in the house, being brutally attacked every time. Piero’s decent into madness/demonic possession is told through flashbacks and in the end an exorcist shows up and saves the day…or?

Damn, this was a sleazy movie. Very sleazy. Not worthless, but very uneven and filled with pointless talking-heads and way too many shots of young Piero’s cameltoe. On the other side, the flashbacks to the orgy is fun and very naked and the movie as one gory death-scene. The set-up is quite ambitious really, like the filmmakers actually had a somewhat serious plan with the movie, but stumbling half-way because of their own incompetence. The great final is just a couple of paintings falling down from the wall, some screaming and puking and a bed floating around above the floor, but nothing spectacular and it’s a bit of an anti-climax. There’s a easily forgotten twist-ending and some good music, but that’s about it.

Richard Conte, the former Hollywood-star, makes his last performance in a role that could have starred literary everyone else close to the movie-set. I guess they just needed some extra starpower and Mr Conte a couple of quick dollaros to fly home to LA again and die.

I would probably buy it if it was released on a good-looking DVD, but until then I doubt I will ever watch it again.