Grade: C-

Verdict: No pea soup this time — just a big blob of Hollywood cheese.

By BOB TOWNSEND
Cox News Service

"Exorcist: The Beginning" is an unholy mess. But how could it not be? The prequel to the 1973 William Peter Blatty-William Friedkin horror classic, "The Exorcist," has been burning in endless development hell since 1997, consuming big budgets in an inferno of Hollywood intrigue.

An earlier version was directed by Paul Schrader ("Hardcore"), then shelved, and Renny Harlin ("Deep Blue Sea") was brought in to start over.

So how bad is the final product? Let's put this way: When it was first released, "The Exorcist" caused nausea, fainting and heart attacks; by comparison, "The Beginning" elicited waves of giggles and guffaws from a preview screening audience.

The story, which was worked on by scriptwriter William Wisher ("Terminator 2") and novelist Caleb Carr ("The Alienist"), with the final screenplay by Alexi Hawley, takes exorcist Father Merrin back to his first confrontation with the devil.

On an archeological dig in post-World War II British colonial Africa, Merrin, played by soulful Stellan Skarsgard, descends into the bowels of a mysterious Byzantine church that seems to have been intentionally buried. What he discovers, besides packs of hyenas, flocks of crows and swarms of flies, is the throne of evil in the world -- the place where Lucifer fell to earth.

There's also a gratuitously monstrous Nazi back story, straight out of "Sophie's Choice," that explains Merrin's loss of faith. And a bit of a forbidden love story, with Merrin coming under the sway of a comely French doctor, played by Izabella Scorupco. But the rest of the movie -- which most certainly ends in a confrontational exorcism, albeit with a bit of a twist -- is about Merrin's struggle to sort out his beliefs about God, man and the devil.

As for the supposedly scary stuff, it comes in boo-gory scenes such as a village boy getting possessed and shaking his bed, a la Linda Blair, a woman birthing a maggot-infested baby and a British officer being attacked by his butterfly collection before blowing his brains out.