Aluminium Christmas Trees: There is a real Turkana people. The region and the lake were named after them, not the other way around.
Critical Backlash: While it's certainly not considered a masterpiece, many feel in retrospect that this was an entirely serviceable — if unintentionally campy at points — horror film that was on a hiding onto nothing with critics due to the controversy over its production and to being a Tough Act to Follow in relation to the original. One notable exception to most negative critics was Roger Ebert, who thought both movies were alright and improved when watched back to back.
1949, the setting of the film, is the same year when the real exorcism that inspired Blatty to write the book, that of Roland Doe, happened.
The Turkana region being the place where Lucifer fell in the remote past and evil presumably started... is also one of the craddles of human evolution.
Inferred Holocaust: We know that the armies wiped each other out. But did the same happen to the civilians in Derati and the Turkana village?
It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Criticism at the time of release was largely a lament for the studio not having faith in Schrader's 'psychological' treatment and retooling it into a typical bloody, Jump Scare-y, fast paced CGI-heavy horror film of The Noughtiesand also for its collection of elements taken from the 1973 film (e.g. the final possession and exorcism) that felt forced and were not as a strong as their original counterparts anyway.
Narm: The scene where Major Granville starts hallucinating that his butterfly collection has come to life, so his response is to... put a gun against his head... an act which then apparently calms the tiny butterflies down and they gradually stop flapping their wings in response as though intimidated. The viewer almost expects to hear the Major threaten during the scene: "Okay, butterfly collection. Stop coming to life or the Major gets it! You hear me? Quit it! Cut it out!" And the butterflies meekly complying "Okayyy..."
Some criticized the film for turning Father Merrin into a knock-off Indiana Jones, forgetting that Merrin doing archeology in the Middle East is right in the first scene of The Exorcist. The book also mentions Merrin exorcizing a boy, and a woman in Kenya before the possession of Regan.
Other criticism referred to Merrin's backstory evoking, but ultimately not matching, what was shown in Exorcist II: The Heretic. In reality, The Exorcist III had already ignored the previous film deliberately, to the point it was only released under this title because of Executive Meddling.
Overshadowed by Controversy: Good luck finding a review that spends any appreciable amount of time actually discussing the film's own merits rather than focusing on its torturous production. Admittedly, the studio likely made things ten times worse by refusing to hold screenings for critics on the grounds that they didn't think critics would review the film impartially, which just made it all the more likely that they wouldn't do so.
Questionable Casting: Every patient at the mental asylum in Nairobi is white, which has several implications and none is nice.
Sequelitis: It received negative reviews on the box office and comments that the movie felt more like a splatter horror than a psychological horror.
Special Effect Failure: Any discussion into this film will immediately bring up the obvious CGI hyenas, flies, crows, and backgrounds of Cairo and the Vatican. Averted with the church and other buildings in Derati, which are also largely CGI but more successfully concealed.
Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist
Contested Sequel: The film continues to divide people, with some considering it a major improvement over The Beginning, while others deem it to be even worse, for not only having most of the flaws of its remake, but being additionally boring as well.
Critical Dissonance: Critics liked this film much more than its second version, but fans are much more polarized about it in turn. Among those, many believe that Beginning at least had the benefit of being entertaining (and mostly for the right reasons), and that Dominion, whatever its points are, is objectively a much less engaging film for the chosen way it carries itself.
Faux Symbolism: One of Granville's butterflies falls from his hand after he commits suicide.
Genius Bonus: Pazuzu appearing as a stereotypical Indian ascetic at the final battle might be a nod to modern religious controversies in the West, especially regarding those Christian fundamentalists who argue that things like Dharmic religions, Meditation and Yoga are too un-Christian for them to suffer (though, ironically, the film is set way before this debate existed in real life in the first place). The original film already did a bit of religious clash by pitting Christian faith against something that is not a devil from Judeo-Christian demonology, but a semi-benevolent ancient Mesopotamian deity.
Improved by the Re-Cut: This chapter of The Exorcist remains one of the most bizarre troubled productions in film history. Originally Paul Schrader was brought to direct a psychological horror movie in the vein of the original; he did his job and almost completed what was called Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist. However, as the movie was being marketed, Morgan Creek Productions decided it was not scary enough to fit expectations, so they tossed the unfinished film into a vault and brought an entirely new director, Renny Harlin, to direct an entirely new movie. This was the final result, a retooling named Exorcist: The Beginning that only shared Skarsgard in the main role and the outlines of its plot. Only after it failed with critics and at the box office did they allow Schrader to finish and release his film, edging out the previous one in success and giving birth to the strange event of two films in one. Both versions received mostly negative reviews, but Dominion is generally considered to be the better (or less bad) version.
Narm: In all honesty, it is not that difficult to see why the studio believed Dominion would fail. The movie contains very little stuff explicitly meant to be scary (or even unsettling) in the first place, and the rest of it only escapes from boredom whenever it allows for unintentional giggles. In particular, the final showdown with Pazuzu being portrayed as a slow talk with a Loincloth-wearing bald guy in a Levitating Lotus Position is just too bizarre to be taken seriously. Given that it got completely replaced by a more traditional fight against a Reagan-esque possession in The Beginning, this scene alone might have been the final touch that killed the film in the execs's eyes.
Pazuzu: You won't touch me with that again, Priest!
Nightmare Retardant: The imagery of this film, most notably the aforementioned Pazuzu, is sometimes too weird to be scary. Cheche is in many ways the most disturbing thing in the movie, and it is only because he is a malformed human.
Questionable Casting: Filipino Billy Crawford as Cheche, a Kenyan. The makeup is good enough to make him appear first emaciated and then possessed, but no attempt is made to make him look black, yet everyone treats him as a local.
Special Effects Failure: Due to the lack of budget, the CGI animals are just done enough to be there and move on the screen. Merrin's face sores were also clearly planned to be enhanced in post-production but then weren't.
