Movie Reviews to Annoy and Infuriate 2020-2023 - Chamber Film Reviews, #4

This book is a collection of film reviews that should make for a good starting place to find something less obvious to watch that is off the beaten track. Among them is the following representative review: Exorcist II: The Heretic - Director's Cut (1977)I re-watched it because I listened to a near five hour podcast by The Projection Booth. As a sequel it's super disappointing and awful. The Exorcist audience rightly violently rejected this as an insulting piece of garbage.
On it's own merits as a standalone film it is just bad. It's a boring story that wasn't worth telling, and it's told in a long-winded, ponderous way. It felt very bloated to the point I wondered many times why many scenes were even in the film as they were barely advancing the story. The ideas are weak or silly (the synchroniser?!) and the script banal. The actors are all wooden and flat. The African sets looks cheap and ugly instead of dream-like and stylised.
A lot of the locations/sets are just weird looking (the glass encased hospital, the skyscraper apartment). I laughed a few times but it isn't incompetent enough to deserve its golden turkey award as being one of the worst films ever made. It's a duff film with bad ideas, some ugly visuals, consistently bad acting, a ponderous pace, creaky dialogue, and overall it's of very little interest.3 out of 10 (Bad)