Is Exorcist II: The Heretic really one of the worst sequels ever made, or have we been watching it all wrong Dear Listener?

Thanks to the documentary Boorman and the Devil, Jett and Gareth reconsider a movie that has been mocked for nearly 50 years. They explore Boorman's career, from Point Blank and Deliverance to Excalibur and The Emerald Forest, and examine how The Heretic fits into his lifelong fascination with myth, nature, and spirituality.

Along the way: Richard Burton's hypnotic screen presence, the spiritual differences between the two Exorcist films, and the mysterious synchronizer that just might explain 20 years of The Film Talk.

Sometimes folks the most interesting movies aren't necessarily the best ones.

Films discussed: Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and Boorman and the Devil (2025).

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Jett and Gareth are overwhelmed by DIGGER, a film they see as exhilarating, horrifying and the most important movie of the moment.

How do you make art in a world that too absurd to satirize? Is DIGGER a climate horror movie, a satire, (or farce), a work about our complicity in the systems we condemn or a piece of art about the difficult job of making art itself? All of the above?

This is a spoiler-heavy conversation. If you haven't seen DIGGER, go see it first, preferably on the biggest screen you can find and then come back.

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Why are we working so hard to make artificial intelligence seem human?

In this solo episode, Jett turns to three works of classic, and semi-classic, science fiction: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Colossus: The Forbin Project, and Harlan Ellison's Demon with a Glass Hand, asking what movies can teach us about our increasingly personal relationship with AI.

HAL raises one possibility: What if a machine really does become something like a living being, with emotions and even a fear of death? Colossus offers a darker path, imagining what happens when we surrender authority to a machine and begin treating it less like a tool than an all-knowing god.

But The Outer Limits episode Demon with a Glass Hand suggests another way forward. Its computer, manifested as a literal hand of glass, is intelligent, extraordinarily useful, and completely unsentimental. It doesn't flatter. It doesn't pretend to be your friend. It's a tool.

Along the way in this episode: AI "personalities," the strange idea of giving software a soul, the pleasure of actually making things, Robert Culp's impeccable wardrobe, Harlan Ellison's legendary temperament, and why Jett has spent the past week wearing a glove and calling ChatGPT "the Glass Hand."

Maybe the question isn't whether AI can become more like us. Maybe it's whether we should stop asking it to.

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