Cheap attempt to cash in with the Exorcist hype
"Magdalena, vom Teufel besessen" is a West German German-language film from 1974, so this one is already over 40 years old. I will spare you all the other German and English titles for this one. I'm m sure you know where to find them. If you take a closer look at the other works by director Boos and writer Rieger, then you already know what to expect here: trash film for the most part. And you would be correct as it is at times embarrassing to see how they were trying to make this a second Exorcist, but it is really only a very poor man's version and I don't even need to have seen this classic (yet) to make such a statement. But back to this one here, it gets especially cringeworthy near the end during the exorcism scene. This is the story of an attractive young woman apparently possessed by an evil spirit and the film is packed with sexual implications, fittingly with Boos' other works. There is just one scene relatively late when the protagonist looks like she is getting raped by an evil force. You don't see genitalia, but it is still all pretty explicit and obscene, never feels as if it makes sense for the story, but really just get the audiences horny. A great body of work was definitely not the reason why lead actress Dagmar Hedrich was cast here, but you can cut the "of work" and you will have the explanation. Her looks are perhaps the only somewhat memorable component of the film. It makes me a bit sad to see actor Rudolf Schündler in here as I quite like him and I believe he was quite a talented actor, which is indicated too by the fact that he appeared actually in "The Exorcist". I guess they must have paid him a lot that he would agree to show up in this embarrassing rip-off. Oh yeah, another positive aspect: I believe somebody got mixed up the duration here. It says 120 minutes on IMDb, but all the versions I found ran for 1 hour and 20 minutes only in fact, so it's definitely good that you don't need to watch another 40 minutes here. But the best is if you skip it altogether. 4 stars out of 10 is probably very much on the generous side. Don't watch.score 4/10
Horst_In_Translation 29 August 2017
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3792861/35407
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