THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

Just pretend it has the right title

William Peter Blatty wrote the novel The Exorcist which was adapted into a film by William Friedkin that became one of the highest grossing of all time.  The studio rushed a sequel, The Exorcist II, which is half blatant cash-grab and half bug-fuck-craziness courtesy of director John Boorman, a specialist in that genre.  Blatty himself directed the true sequel, The Exorcist III, a flawed but fascinating movie based on his novel Legion.  But before that, following the success of The Exorcist, Blatty re-wrote one of his own early novels, Twinkle Twinkle Killer Kane, with a new title, The Ninth Configuration.  Blatty wanted to adapt the novel himself into a film, but no studio was interested, Blatty put up half the money himself and got the rest from Pepsico, who agreed to finance the project with only one steadfast stipulation: the production had to be based in Hungary, where they had extra money they needed to spend.  As long as Blatty filmed in Hungary, doubling for the American Pacific Northwest, he could direct any sort of weird-ass picture he wanted.  And quite the weird-ass picture he did direct; the DVD cover is of an astronaut on the moon watching the crucifixion of Jesus and yes, that scene is in the movie.

Mustache Hall of Fame member Stacy Keach stars at Colonel Kane, the new commanding officer at an enormous, military, psychiatric hospital based out of a remote forest castle, but before the film delivers us this information and the plot starts in earnest, an opening segment shows another character, fearful astronaut Billy Cutshaw who may or may not be the same astronaut threatened by Regan in The Exorcist, staring out a window while painful soft rock drones on for two and a half minutes; a terrible way to open a film, any kind of film, especially a confusing violent one about crazy people.  Keach is supposed to whip the hospital into shape, as many of the inmates are suspected of faking their mental illnesses to avoid service.

The parade of inmates is quite the colorful collection of character actors.  Jason Miller, the young priest from The Exorcist, is an officer attempting to translate and stage a production of Shakespeare's works with dogs, and Ed Flanders, not a cartoon relative, plays the chief medical officer years before he would turn up in The Exorcist III.  Moses Gunn doesn't seem to have very many scenes that survived the suitably schizophrenic editing that this film endured (supposedly at least 5 versions exist ranging 99 to 140 minutes) but since he wears a Superman costume for most of the film he makes quite an impression any way.  William Lucking, Alejandro Rey, Joe Spinell, and Robert Loggia also turn up, in addition to legendary genre star Tom Atkins, who fondly recalled the film during a 2009 interview:

"I have always believed that a movie about the making of that film would have been much better than the actual movie turned out to be. It was kind of a zoo from the very beginning. William Peter Blatty wrote and directed it and financed part of it by selling a home that he had in Malibu. His idea of getting a good ensemble effort from his actors was to take people over to Budapest for two months--the part I had might have taken two weeks in the States but he had us all over there for two months. All he ended up getting was 22 really upset, angry and drunk actors who had a lot of trouble showing up for work. I thought that the script was wonderful but I don’t think that Blatty ever got what he wanted up on the screen. I think a lot of us took the job because we would be able to go to Prague and Moscow and bounce around Europe when we weren’t working. He decided that he would put up the call sheet for the next day at midnight so that you couldn’t go anywhere." #

Oddly enough, most of the backstage problems probably contributed to the general tone of insanity, of never knowing who to trust or what's really going on.  Just like in real life, when someone offers us an explanation or tells us something, we don't get to see a flashback or a montage showing us what they were talking about, we just have to take them at their word.  And of course that can get a bit difficult when everybody around you seems to be screaming bloody mad, not to mention Col. Kane himself, whose only two moods seem to be sedate and volcanic, and whose nightmares are plagued by visions of wartime atrocities.  Even the hospital dog is nuts!  The temperamental mutt looks like a living, dirty mop head.

Stacy Keach replaced Nicol Williamson in the starring role, but Williamson eventually got to make a small and totally unnecessary appearance in The Exorcist III.  But it boggles the mind to think he was cast in this.  Some British actors are more likely to play James Bond, and some are more likely to play Sherlock Holmes, and Williamson falls firmly into the latter category, not the least because he played Sherlock Holmes once in The Seven-Percent Solution.  He also played Merlin in Boorman's Excalibur, so once again I say, it boggles the mind to think he was cast as a fearsome American Colonel.

The movie contains much philosophizing, expounding on the nature of God and humanity and whether or not acts of real self-sacrifice and nobility are even possible in our world.  Somebody calls God a giant foot, somebody is so afraid of the moon that they have nightmares about it, and generally a lot of freak-deaky points of view are discussed.  Some of the metaphors are a bit clumsy, and sometimes things get so confusing that an authority has to step in and explain everything that happened in the first hour (thanks for that by the way).  I'm not even sure how the ending to Kane's saga even relates to the stated theme of the story, and the awkward climatic confrontation with a random unconvincing biker gang that proceeds it leaves something to be desired, although its fun to hear a stock scream sound effect that will be readily familiar to anyone who has played Starcraft.  This film is a damned interesting mess.

You don't need a reason to grow a mustache but Stacy Keach has a good one