John Boorman has spent decades living down "Exorcist II: The Heretic," and a new film lets him tell the story himself. David Kittredge's "Boorman and the Devil" offers a thoroughly enjoyable, detailed account of the catastrophe that was Boorman's 1977 sequel to "The Exorcist," the 1973 hit horror directed by William Friedkin.

The original film made audiences scream. The sequel made them scream with laughter. Kittredge's documentary frames "The Heretic" as a deeply ill-conceived and widely derided follow-up: a bizarre but ambitious fantasy supernatural rhapsody, brimming with unintentional comedy.

Yet the film was not without merit. "Exorcist II" was visually bold and even brilliant, pioneering in its use of Steadicam. Boorman persuaded Linda Blair and Max von Sydow to return from the first film. He cast Richard Burton as a troubled priest and Louise Fletcher as a psychiatrist whose weird "mind-reader" contraption, in the film's most notoriously ridiculed element, was entirely ridiculous.

The documentary's most vivid material concerns the reception. According to an apocryphal tale gleefully repeated by Friedkin, the sequel so enraged one audience that its members turned round and booed Warner Brothers executives sitting in the back row of the cinema. They then chased the executives out of the building and down the street.

Boorman desperately recut the film, removing the sillier bits. The damage was already done. The film's reputation as a disaster had taken hold, and the re-edit could not save it.

Kittredge's achievement, as the review of his documentary suggests, is a re-evaluation. The film argues, or at least invites viewers to consider, that "The Heretic" was widely and unfairly panned — a position Boorman himself holds, and one he details here with what the review calls mortifying generosity about the experience of making it.

The sequel's failures were real. So was its ambition. Boorman attempted a fantasy supernatural rhapsody where the original offered grounded horror, and the mismatch between expectation and execution produced much of the unintentional comedy that sank the film with audiences and critics alike.

But the technical record complicates the dismissal. A film pioneering Steadicam use, shot with visual boldness, and carrying performances from Burton, von Sydow, Blair and Fletcher — fresh off her Oscar-winning turn — does not read as cynical hackwork. It reads as a serious director's reach exceeding his grasp.

That tension between ambition and ridicule is what makes "The Heretic" a lasting subject for documentary treatment nearly half a century after its release. Kittredge's film joins a broader reassessment of 1970s studio extravaganzas that flopped on arrival and found defenders later.

For Boorman, now in his nineties, the documentary offers something the 1977 release never did: a hearing. Whether the re-evaluation converts audiences who laughed the executives out of the cinema remains the test for a film whose reputation has always been fixed by its first viewers.