The Ninth Configuration

It's easy to see why Exorcist author William Peter Blatty's debut effort as a director stayed on the shelf for a year. This unfathomable yarn about an ace US Army psychiatrist, at work in an isolated military nuthouse populated by a gallery of service fruitcakes (from cowardly astronauts and Congressional Medal winners to Vietnam war malingerers) has the same tortured Christian iconography as Blatty's bestseller, but is altogether more pretentious on the level of reflection about the Problem of Evil and the question Is God Dead (or is he just living in sin?). A kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Catch-22, or maybe Fuller's Shock Corridor set as an episode from The Twilight Zone. Sounds interesting enough, but isn't.