'90s Horror Movie I Just Saw for the First Time, Part II

The Exorcist III (two stars total) Have you ever played the "Telephone" game (also known as Gossip, or Chinese Whispers in Britain)? For those who don't know how it goes, one player comes up with a message or a phrase and whispers in the ear of another player. That second player then whispers what they think they heard in the ear of a third player, and on and on down the line for however many players there are. Usually the message or phrase received by the last player is so much better or funnier than what the first player came up with. Such was the case with someone describing a scene in The Exorcist III (1990) to me. What I remember hearing, and what I've passed on to others, is that there's a scene in a rest home where the devil is jumping from body to body and an exorcist arrives at the scene looking for the possessed. He goes from room to room looking in every direction but up. Then he finally looks up and there's an old guy in a wheelchair levitating upside-down from the ceiling who crashes down on top of him. Sounds scary, right? Believe me, it's much scarier than the actual scene. In the movie, there really is an old guy in a wheelchair, but he's in a hospital wing, not a rest home and he isn't the one who gets possessed. It's the exorcist (Nicol Williamson, who played a freaky shrink on Return to Oz, 1985, and a demon on Spawn, 1997) who's hanging from the ceiling when a homicide detective (George C. Scott from TV's A Christmas Carol, 1984, Dr. Strangelove, 1964, and Patton, 1970) bursts into a "disturbed" patient's cell (Brad Dourif from Child's Play , 1988, and most recently, Rob Zombie's Halloween, 2007). I used to tell my version as a scary story around the campfire as a lesson to my fellow campers about being aware of your surroundings, not just in front and back and to the sides, but above and below as well. The movie doesn't try to make that point. It's too busy trying to adapt all of the philosophical tangents from Legion (1983), the novel it's based on, which is a sequel to The Exorcist novel (1971). Boths books were written by the director of The Exorcist III. What that loosely translates to is a bunch of big-time actors sitting around reading lines. WITH EMOTION. Or in the case of a fat, out-of-breath George C. Scott, who was nominated for Worst Actor at the Golden Rasberry Awards, that means losing control of his emotions and raising his eyebrows. A LOT. I do recommend the movie for dream sequences with Fabio and Patrick Ewing, and an early appearance of Samuel L. Jackson.