“Lick Me!”
Profoundly silly exercise that attempts to conjure up superior sources of literal and parody humor like Airplane! or the Naked Gun movies. Writer/Director Bob Logan had worked with Linda Blair twice before with How to Get …. Revenge, a made-for-video presentation that pre-dated some of the earliest YouTube content (back when YouTube was fun) by about fifteen years, and a quirky romantic comedy titled Up Your Alley (which reunited her with Night Patrol co-star Murray Langston).
The Exorcist seemed ripe for this kind of spoof, but I fear Blair (and Logan) waited too long, considering she had tried to re-invent herself as a serious actress after several low-budget direct-to-video exploitation movies. She had fun with her image in Repossessed, as does Leslie Nielsen as Father Jedediah Mayii (or “May-I” as it’s pronounced).
Writer William Peter Blatty brought his original novel back to prominence with his own sequel, Exorcist III. Warner Bros. forced the franchise back on him when they demanded he rename the movie from his original script, Legion, to tie in the Exorcist narrative.
Several more sequels came in later years. Exorcist II: The Heretic was re-evaluated and deemed a misguided classic. In the early ’90s, though, the subject was ignored. Roughly ten years later, Blatty’s version of The Exorcist was released to theaters with a couple of additional scenes. Even after seeing it at the movies, I still prefer the original theatrical version.
There’s a reason directors get final cut. Usually, producers or writers don’t figure into the equation, and it’s because they have a bottom line. The writer wants to see everything he wrote up on the screen. The producer wants to see everything he paid for up on the screen. The director wants to tell a story visually on his own terms while negotiating with writers and producers.
Don’t get me started on the people who write, produce, and direct their movies. They’re schizophrenics.
Nancy Aglet is a suburban wife and mother who, as a child, was possessed by a demon, which was then exorcised by Father Mayii. Some seventeen years later, the demon has returned, even though her children chalk up her bizarre behavior to PMS. Father Mayii brings in a younger priest, a quasi-Damien Karras named Brophy (Anthony Starke) to help him perform another exorcism, and away we go.
Even as the movie keeps chucking D-list celebrity cameos at us, it progressively gets less and less funny, and by the end, I realized this was quite possibly the most agonizingly silly and stupid movie I’ve ever seen. But that was before I watched House II: The Second Story.
October 20, 2026
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