Jim Mullen Tate (TheFearmakers)
Writer/Director William Peter Blatty, whose novel THE EXORCIST was made into a groundbreaking horror masterpiece by THE FRENCH CONNECTION Oscar-winner William Friedkin, takes personal, independent pride in his very own picture, THE NINTH CONFIGURATION...Mostly because the critics deemed how insanely original it is since "Robert Loggia sings Al Jolson in blackface" and "Jason Miller rehearses HAMLET using dogs" and "Moses Gunn wears superhero spandex" or "a man dressed as a nun tries exorcising a soda machine" or "an image of the crucifixion on the moon," and on and on the weirdness goes but, in the reality of this surreal anti-war, existentialist vs religion fable: being set inside a castle that serves as an insane asylum, there could have been even more nutty stuff... Anything goes in a story about human beings who are seemingly without logic or limits... And in that, NINTH is actually an extremely grounded vehicle...Upon a wide-shot glance it's an esemble comedy, as if the members of MASH's 4077th practiced witchcraft on benzedrine, but there are really only two characters that actually matter. One is Scott Wilson, playing the same astronaut that Linda Blair warned was "gonna die up there" before she soaked the rug in THE EXORCIST, based on Blatty's famous novel (yet that is never mentioned)...His Captain Billy Cutshaw is the type of 'Crazy like a Fox' character who can spout as much meaningful dialogue as is allowed to counter his rambling residual of meaningless gibberish, and he's nicely balanced by Stacy Keach's silent and seemingly non-troubled Col. Vincent Kane...As the new psychologist inside the castle of war-weary loons, he's there to listen yet is just too perfect, somehow... As Billy puts it, foreshadowing BLADE RUNNER by a few years, "Too human to be human" (and here's a personal favorite line, "the essence of suicide is not collecting the insurance")...There's probably not a more downright quotable motion picture ever made, despite Blatty, the writer, aiming words like sharpened arrows within this Gothic locale that could've used a little more suspense and intrigue to complete its dark, formidable canvas: this includes creature-statues right out of THE EXORCIST's Iraqi tomb-digging prologue... Leaving any kind of mainstream fare to a third-act sequence involving a popular cinematic device during the late 70's/early 80's: Rowdy bikers in a crowded tavern. Although the "bar-fight scene" is more DELIVERANCE-eerie than action-packed, and is part of an important twist that, had they used the source novel's title for this adaptation, would be a spoiler in itself, marring what really connects two polar opposites... the believer and the non-believer... into a labor-of-love cult film that seemed, by the screenplay alone, meant to be that and nothing else: Some movies haven't got a choice. (cultfilmfreaks.com)
shane013a-1
This was actually written as the follow-up to the Exorcist. The film Exorcist 2 according to Blatty himself in one interview didn't work because the director was a Protestant, and in another interview that it was because he wasn't a believer. There is no understanding why the series was not produced as written. Chronologically it would have been: Exorcist (1973), The Ninth Configuration (1980),Exorcist 3 (1990), Exorcist: The Beginning (2004). The movies were a work of faith and should be examined as such. To hire another writer to create a sensationalist bit of horror totally unconnected with the original just for the idea of making a buck off the popularity of the first, is so typical and yet in this case at least, sad. One should have the option of watching these expressions as they were meant to be seen by the author rather then a cheap thrill ride which demeans not only a very compassionate writer, but the audience as well. This should serve as a lesson to serious film geeks, be sure of what you are watching 'cause you are going to be the only person you can trust to have your viewing interests at heart.
fedor8
TNC starts off as a cross between "M*A*S*H", "Cuckoo's Nest" and "Britannia Hospital", but not nearly as good as any of them. (Eventually it becomes "Rambo" before Rambo, but I'll get to that later.) A fear started setting in that this was yet another late-70s/early-80s Vietnam-war-related flick, carrying some damn self-important hence deluded peacenik message about "how bad bad bad the Vietnam war was". Not another one, I thought, won't they ever tire of the same old bull? Still, to comfort and motivate myself to continue watching this, I figured I'd rather see a war-themed movie about a bunch of half-crazed loony-bin Vietnam veterans than Jane Fonda taking care of a wheelchair-bound soldier in some corny Oscar-winning schmaltz-fest.Nevertheless, it soon became apparent that the crux of this story is not that the hippies, gullible/clueless students and their Marxist college professors had a valid point, but something entirely different: the age-old dilemma of whether God (referred to Wilson as "Foot") exists or not, whether there is reason to hope or to despair. In a nutshell. Unfortunately, Blatty (writer/director/producer) spends too much time in the first half involving the new "shrink" Keach in pointless, usually tiresome dialogues with the patients, most of whom quote so much from literature, philosophy and science that one could get the impression that the US military drafted most of its soldiers from colleges – which is of course not at all the case.TNC takes a sudden turn for the interesting when the movie's major plot-twist comes into play: Keach is really just another patient, the notorious "Killer Kane", allowed to play shrink in order to try and cure himself of his guilty conscience. Of course, this is a totally absurd premise, but the movie had already treaded bizarre-movie territory, so what the hell. I had half-suspected that Kane wasn't a real shrink, given the empty stare on his face throughout much of the first half, i.e. something seemed to be afoot, and it was.Sadly, while the second half is far more interesting, it also has TNC's absolute low point. It was quite predictable that before the movie was over there would be a moment in which Kane would "regress" to his old Killer-Kane self. And this is where the biker gang comes in: the moronic, over-the-top brutal, aggressive, violent biker gang that exists nowhere in the real world except in Blatty's somewhat strange vision of what "Bikerland America" must look like. This gang follows every cliché in the 60s B-movie rule-book about how to portray biker gangs. (Real bikers probably laugh or throw beer-cans at the screen whenever they see this kind of nonsense in movies.)The leader of the gang is played by a guy who looks nothing like a biker, much less a biker leader, and who actually wears EYE-LINER. (Actually, he'd be better off cast as a beach bum in a silly sex-romp comedy.) Yes; Blatty, who must have been an old geezer by the time he wrote this novel, was utterly out of touch with pop-culture specifics so he confused the 70s glam-rock poser movement with the quasi-hippie biker-gang culture. This extremely silly, utterly fictional gang starts torturing Wilson, an event which predictably causes Kane to take matters into his own hands, but not before being tortured himself for a while, in a game which the bikers call "beach-ball". Wilson gets a biker penis stuck into his mouth, and this proves to be the final straw for Kane who then starts off a Rambo-like outburst of violence which leaves half a dozen bikers dead in its wake. I am no expert on biker gangs, but something tells me that gay sex is NOT high on the list of their "fun-to-do-things-when-I'm-happy-and-drunk" list. (So clueless is Blatty that the end-credits don't even refer to the gang members as "bikers" but "cyclists" instead!)Eventually, Kane takes his own life, proving to Wilson that "goodness" in people truly exists, which in turn cures Wilson. To make the ending even more bitter-sweetly idealistic, Blatty allows the dead Kane to leave a sign to Wilson years later, just as Wilson had asked of him should Kane die first, proving that there is life after death after all. Wilson is overjoyed, and he smiles. Last scene; the end. Not only had he been cured years earlier, but now he can be a Foot-follower as well, just like all the rest. (Or nearly all.) The notion that "good/selfless" deeds prove that God exists is a rather naive one, but I'll let that pass. I suppose that is why Blatty needed Kane's sign from the grave, too, in order to cement the victory for the "God does exist" crowd.There are moments in TNC that are intelligent, insightful or interesting, such as the patient who is "punishing the wall atoms" with a hammer for not letting him pass through it (evidently, this soldier had been well-informed about quantum mechanics and particle physics), or the scene in which Wilson finally reveals to Kane and the viewers what the real reason was for not aborting the Moon mission. TNC also has an excellent visual quality, so typical of the period during which it was filmed, so it's a pity that the movie's potential didn't amount to more. But, as I said, when you introduce an exaggeratedly over-the-top biker gang into your movie then all you can do is cheapen the end-product that way. Never use biker-gangs as a plot-device; never – even in a comedy, let alone a drama.And yet again Richard Lynch was hired to play a gay man. "Scarecrow", "God Told Me To", (and perhaps a few others?) and now this. How does a (casting) director look at Lynch and think "gee, he'd be ideal as a gay man"? I simply don't get it. But I guess it's the same moronic reasoning that gets Angelina Jolie cast as a professional killer or Sean Penn as an intellectual.
