10 Movie Sequels With The Most Shocking Drops In Quality
3. Exorcist II: The Heretic
If you ask horror hounds what the worst sequel in horror movie history is, a good portion of those will immediately bring up Exorcist II: The Heretic.
Not only did The Heretic have the daunting task of following an iconic picture, it was also just absolute trash. It's one thing to not match the ridiculously high quality of your predecessor, yet it's something else entirely if a follow-up is awful on a multitude of levels.
Released in 1977 - four years after William Freidkin's The Exorcist - The Heretic picks things up with a 16-year-old Regan MacNeil, who's now in a psychiatric facility and purportedly has no memories of the events of the previous film. Along for the ride, there's Father Lamont, a priest troubled by his own exorcism experiences which left a woman dead, and who is now investigating the circumstances of Father Merrin's death during his encounter with the Pazuzu-possessed Regan.
There's brainwave monitoring, there's locusts, there's trippy visions, there's doppelgangers, there's some horrendous dialogue, and not even the presence of Richard Burton - who played Lamont - could save this from being an utter stinker.