Director Renny Harlin is the guy you call in to do something else someone else has done before, but bigger-louder-faster, please.

He began his career with a sequel -- 1988's "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: Dream Master" -- and he made his name with a sequel -- 1990's "Die Hard 2."

In between, he has occasionally forsaken sequels for unofficial remakes, ripping off "Jaws" as "Deep Blue Sea" and rehabbing Errol Flynn's entire swashbuckler resume as "Cutthroat Island."

One could be forgiven for suggesting that Harlin hasn't got an original thought in his cranium.

It's a suggestion unlikely to change with the arrival of his latest work, one that may, in fact, be unique not only to Renny Harlin's career but to Hollywood history in general.

For it is both a remake and a sequel, in the same breath.

"Exorcist: The Beginning" began its existence as a reputedly serious attempt at providing the 1973 "Exorcist" with an intelligent, philosophically prone predecessor. The idea was to document the early adventures of Father Lancaster Merrin, originally played in middle age by Max Von Sydow.

Paul Schrader, co-author of "Taxi Driver" and director of only one other horror film (the 1982 remake of "Cat People"), shot Warner Bros. their prequel, with that talented master of the Nordic glower, Stellan Skarsgaard, as the young Father Merrin.

With an apparent shocking lack of projectile vomiting and crucifix-defilement, the studio deemed the net result anti-commercial to the max and -- in an unprecedented move -- ordered it immediately remade, using the same sets and, where possible, actors (Skarsgaard's schedule allowed him to stay aboard for the second time around).

Harlin, of course, was hired to come in and soup up, so to speak, Schrader's debacle. He agreed, only on the condition that he be allowed to start from scratch. (Ironically, he included everything BUT the projectile pea-soup vomiting.)

What we have, then, is not only the first combo sequel/remake in Hollywood history, but also the most brilliantly concerted campaign for a special-edition DVD witnessed to date (yes, the studio has announced that it will pair Schrader's shelved version with the escaped one -- probably within a month or two, ensuring that the cash-in will occur in the utmost timely fashion).

The version now playing at a theater near you is probably as watchable as could be hoped. In fact, the tone is deadly somber. Skarsgaard is fully committed to his re-stitched character and the violence -- almost always involving children -- is unstinting.

But, at the same time, the script is a tedious, repetitive recycling of themes and situations that long ago passed into the realm of parody and "Scary Movie" dismantling.

In a nutshell: It's 1949, and, thanks to a World War II episode with the Nazis in his native Holland -- it involves the execution of a young girl, just one of a dozen acts of violence aimed against children and graphically depicted -- Father Merrin has given up the faith. As a result, now he is simply Lancaster Merrin, archaeologist, bumming around Cairo.

That pursuit sends him to a dig in Kenya, where a Christian Byzantine church has been unearthed from the desert sands where one shouldn't have existed. That "shouldn't" part is the tip-off that evil is afoot. And, in short order, the famous demon that hounded Merrin in the 1973 film makes its first appearance in his life, possessing a young village boy (Remy Sweeney) and perpetrating countless deeds of gratuitous evil.

Everything from maggot-infested newborn babes to the standard obscene sexual/sacred epithets is involved.

Harlin is not a director of great subtlety, and he seems to be more interested in one-upping the famous scene in his own "Deep Blue Sea" in which Samuel L. Jackson is dismembered by a pack of sharks. Here, it's a young native child torn apart before our eyes by a pack of demonic hyenas (computer-generated, of course).

Since the 1973 version transgressed where no movie had gone before, we've had 30 years of pretenders going boldly beyond that frontier, and the shock of the new wore away a long time ago. As a result, Harlin's attempt at charting new turf through the graphic dispatching of children seems rather sad and desperate.

If that's what he has to do to get a rise out of us -- obviously in a way that Schrader didn't deem necessary in his banished version -- then I think it's time for us to consider emulating the disillusioned Father Merrin.

At least in the realm of movie faith.