After original director John Frankenheimer died, Paul Schrader took over the reins but was on the receiving end of endless re-writes and the departure of leading man Liam Neeson.

Soldiering on, he managed to sign up respected Scandinavian actor Stellan Skarsgard to play Father Lankester Merrin (whose name sounds like a resident of Pogle's Wood).

Sticking to the disturbingly allegorical template of William Friedkin's original, he forged ahead...but Warner Bros apparently wanted more buckets of blood for their bucks.

They drafted in action man Renny "Die Hard" Harlin to jack up the shock quotient, unsurprisingly putting Schrader's nose out of joint.

When he insisted on his name being removed from the credits the studio decided to ditch the whole $30m movie and handed Harlin $50m to almost completely re-shoot it. Days into filming in Rome, the director broke his leg in a car accident.

To cap it all, it was then announced that both Schrader's and Harlin's version are to be released on DVD. Confused? Wait until you seen the film (Harlin's baby).

In an uncomfortable cross between The Omen and Zulu, we see how Father Merrin lost his faith (an encounter with a nasty Nazi) and first encountered the pure evil that was later to manifest itself in Linda Blair's Regan.

Despatched to the African desert and an inexplicably preserved Christian Byzantine church, he is asked to recover an ancient relic supposedly hidden inside.

Surprise, surprise, this leads to all sorts of nastiness involving upsidedown crosses, cannibalistic crows, black magic and stillborn babies crawling with maggots.

The one shining light in this debacle is Skarsgard, whose quiet authority as Father Merrin lends the show a certain dignity.

Tim Evans