"...the power of Christ compels you..."

Okay, whilst browsing the Roobarbs DVD forum, I came across a thread about the poor quality of the Blu Ray version of the William Friedkin movie, The French Connection, which included a snippet from an article mentioning how the forthcoming Blu Ray version of The Exorcist will be treated. Read it and weep;

A couple of things...

Firstly, what is with this fiddling with the colour of the film? A  B&W print combined with a bluish print? WTF? This sounds most weird, and if it works as badly as the fiddling with the French Connection went - it's been described thus; "The colour has been almost disconnected from the image. It bleeds horribly and looks like something from a dodgy VHS copy." - The Exorcist will look like something spewed forth from Regan's mouth.

Secondly, the edit on the Blu Ray; just the 12 minute extended "Version You've Never Seen Before"? Well... despite the name being about a decade out of date, releasing this version and this version only is a mistake. Never mind that the original edit is a much better one than the extended version, and that the four major cuts were all cut for good reasons... oh, no... Whilst Friedkin's statement that "people wanted to see everything" is perfectly true, this is does not mean that people wanted this extended version to supercede the original. We wanted to see these scenes because we were curious to see what they were as The Exorcist is such a brilliant film. When we saw them, as glad we were to have seen them, it was obvious why they were cut. 

It is the original version of the film we all fell in love with, the pace of it, the way it looks. That's the film we want on Blu Ray. That's our Exorcist. The extended version is a mere curiosity, and curiosity has been sated.

I wonder what Mark Kermode thinks of all this...?