SATAN: THE EARLY YEARS

There is a terrific moment about an hour-and-a-half into Renny Harlin's satanic knees-up in which Stellan Skarsgård, an actor capable of great subtlety and whatever the opposite of that may be, shoulders a shovel and advances purposefully through a Gothic graveyard lit by an evil moon.

The message is clear: if the Devil gets in Father Terminator's way, he is not going to take any nonsense. "Spin your head at me," his posture seems to say, "and I will smash it into pulp with my big spade".

Up to this point, Exorcist: The Beginning has been more boring than dreadful. Much has been written about the film's difficult history. The first director, John Frankenheimer, died during pre-production (from a stroke, not from falling down a flight of exterior steps) and the second, Paul Schrader, was sacked because his footage was deemed insufficiently revolting. If Schrader's cut, rumoured to be set for release on the DVD, maintains the mood of the opening act of Harlin's flick then it may be, well, just about OK.

Following the early adventures of Father Merrin, the character played by Max Von Sydow in William Friedkin's 1973 original, as he investigates curious events in the African desert, ETB builds nicely enough for the first hour - computer-generated hyenas savage small children, mad old drunks get disembowelled, that sort of thing - then, clearly having little faith in the patience of its target audience, goes completely and utterly bananas.

Merrin, now behaving more like a Jedi than a priest, finds himself, spade in hand, slugging it out with a possessed human - which human is supposed to be a surprise - in an underground cave. Nobody would call Friedkin's film subtle, but it did admit that it may require more than a cudgel and fists to defeat He Who Walks Backwards.

Donald Clarke