Beyond Redemption

THE REDEEMER (Son of Satan) has been given a solidly authored Blu by Code Red. There's no menu, and the print is scratched to shit in parts, but considering what a train wreck the movie is, the print damage actually enhances the experience: watching it close-up on my 55" TV was like staring at a fouled-up print at an old third-run grindhouse.

Almost every part in this cinematic hodgepodge of influences is played badly; from the evil priest who targets adults playing kids at a high school reunion to the "kids" themselves, director Constantine S. Gochis's handling of the talent is appalling and consistently miscalculated.

The film attempts to tell a not-terribly-original-but-ludicrous story of a nutty pastor seeking redemption by dressing up in disguise and killing kids at their high school reunion. Not even the reunion makes sense because almost nobody shows, and the school has been closed for years. The nutty pastor also sports a second thumb, an obvious prosthetic, that he is trying to get rid of. In one sequence, a schoolboy with a bowl haircut is seen sporting the thumb. The thumb's significance is never explained.

Watching a film that is attempting to capitalize on the success of quality cinema like THE OMEN, but has no talent behind it, is actually mildly enjoyable. As an audience, we're served up one stupid, incompetent scene after another, and some of them are so stupid they're surreal. We get a kill-crazy clown puppet on strings, a drowning in a bathroom sink, a spear that falls into a skull, and a shooting in the woods by a fat man sporting a wig and fake mustache –– for no discernible reason.

The film is copyrighted 1978, and certainly looks it, but, strangely enough, it has elements of films that would be released several years later such as FEAR NO EVIL, LEMORA:A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL, XTRO, COMMUNION, and ALICE SWEET ALICE. Of course, it doesn't come within a hundred miles of besting any of these movies, but it somehow manages to spit out bits and pieces that, consciously or unconsciously, got picked up and became part of horror culture years later.

The Code Red sleeve has some honest, amusing quotes about the movie:

"Guilty of the same gaping plot holes and cardboard characterizations as any other... nothing is ever adequately developed or explained, so the film becomes memorable for its opacity alone."
-- Fred Beldin, Allmovies.com

Beldin also accuses the film of being "a silly, sanctimonious slasher..."

He's not wrong.

Still, there's something perverse about this nonsense being on BluRay, and being marketed for its more shitful aspects.

It's worth adding to your BluRay sub-section marked "cinematic crud".

Did Siskel and Ebert give the film their thumbs-up? I seriously doubt it.

Best Retro DVD's/BR's OF 2011

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Romano Scavolini's Nightmare

Romano Scavolini's Nightmare (aka 'Nightmares in a Damaged Brain'), now out on DVD via Code Red, has been an enduring favorite of mine. Over the decades, I've consulted it whenever I needed a shot of bleak, and it's always provided the charge I was craving.

The more I watch it, the more it reminds me of another favorite, the superior Clean Shaven ('93), Lodge Kerrigan's amazing odyssey of a schizophrenic man searching for his daughter. Both films are set in muted coastal regions (Nightmares in Florida, Clean Shaven in Long Island, NY), and take full advantage of their regional isolation, and sense of industrial decay. Downbeat and introspective, they'd make quite a double feature, something to slash your wrists by.

Grouped a little too lazily into the 'Slasher' category, Nightmare is a film about a man hunting humans, but it's also a film about his pain and the failure of the establishment to contain him.  As you do, he focuses his murderous desires on a family, and forms a strange type of relationship with a young boy, the family prankster. As this is a horror film, family members end up dead and dismembered, and director Scavolini (working with Tom Savini and Ed French) delivers the gore without restraint.

It's not a perfect film. It's slow in parts (particularly the middle) and the killer's decisions are not clear. Why does he pick this particular family to stalk? Did he once live in their house? Perhaps. Baird Stafford, who plays the killer, does a good job embodying the man with a damaged brain, a brain damaged further harmed by experimental, psychotic drugs. Although the marketing point of this film is graphic violence, it lifts itself out of the slasher ghetto inhabited by swill such as Final Exam, Savage Weekend, Chopping Mall and Prom Night by creating a truly disturbing aura around the killer and providing a sleazy, uneasy atmosphere of hopelessness. And, as noted, the violence is very graphic and features some underage mayhem.

The Code Red DVD features three versions of the movie. The version on the second disk in the best. An unbelievable misstep on the part of the distributor is the inclusion of a 95 minute Italian language interview with the director that is not subtitled (!) Yes, they didn't bother to get subtitles done. A rumor circulating is that somebody who was supposed to do the subs didn't come through with the goods. Come on, how hard would it have been to find someone who spoke Italian? Jesus! With street dates approaching and no subtitles done, wouldn't it have been wise to find someone else to do the job? Or am I too logical?

Gripes aside, it's great to see Nightmare out and about at last.

Messiah of Evil

 

I've grown a bit tired of zombie movies. Everybody is doing zombies these days, even George Romero, the guy who shoved them into the mainstream in the first place.

Each film is a variation on dead people walking, just as each vampire film is a variation on fanged people sucking. I don't dislike zombie movies -- never have. But due to the onslaught of them recently, I feel minimal excitement when a new one is announced.

So I decided to go back to an old one. I read about Messiah of Evil eons ago. Whenever poor Howard the Duck was discussed in a predominantly negative light, director Willard Huyck and producer Gloria Katz would be discussed also.  Sometimes, their first feature film, Messiah of Evil, would get a mention.  Until recently, a decent version of the film has not been available.

Towards the close of 2009, Code Red released a special edition of Messiah on DVD. "Terror you won't want to remember in a film you won't be able to forget" ran the tag along the bottom of the cover sleeve.

I'm happy to say that I watched it over a month ago and haven't forgotten it -- but I'm happy to remember the terror.

When a woman (Mariana Hill) arrives in Point Dune, a strange California beach town, in search of her missing father, she is greeted without warmth or hospitality. Michael Greer, a strange fellow permanently flanked by two attractive women with continental cinema morality, offers Hill some vague information about her father's whereabouts, but he seems indifferent to her and everything else. We get the sense that the town has become a purgatory of sorts, a waiting room for souls bound for hell.

Hill's encounter with a scary looking albino man at the local gas station is more evidence that Point Dune may have slipped off the map entirely.

I experienced unique feelings watching Carnival of Souls for the first time, and these were stirred once  again watching this. Like Messiah's heroine, the heroine of Souls arrives in a new town that inspires more questions than answers. She was fleeing from an accident and starting a new job, but she took a detour through a strange mirage first seen on the horizon from the road. The mirage turned out to be real, but it provided no comfort in the end.

Messiah has a tone and atmosphere akin to Souls, and the musky scent of Richard Blackburn's Lemora - A Child's Tale of the Supernatural, one of my all-time favorite spook pics. As in Lemora, the air is thick with dread and apprehension here, and a troubling erotic siren calls to the characters.

The film is about discovery, and memory, and it's an exceptionally well made production with some stunning art direction. The massive murals that plaster the walls of the house where Hill's father once resided are shot in such a way that they encroach on the characters standing in front of them, and become participants in the film themselves.

The film's depiction of Point Dune is unique, and represents a deliberate choice that pays off. That choice is not to portray the town as abandoned or shuttered. Some infrastructure still exists. The heroine's trip to the supermarket ('Ralph's') is fraught with tension because the too bright lights of the store invite suspicion. Her subsequent visit to the cinema becomes one of the film's most effective set pieces, and is a textbook example of suspense building. Huyck, the director, maintains the tension by insisting on a sense of normality that screws with our assumptions. 


There are zombies and they do eat flesh. They're pale, sad, reluctant benefactors of a hell-born disease that is threatening to spread beyond the town. Hill's encounters with them drive her towards insanity when she comprehends the hopelessness of her situation.

The beach setting, and some ritualistic scenes of burying and burning on the beach, possess a Jean Rollin quality. The atmosphere of dread, and the odd sense that a greater, darker power is at work, is pure Lovecraft. The frantic flight of the couple in Narcisso Ibanez Serrador's tense Who Could Kill A Child? is also echoed here only because I saw Serrador's film first; Messiah, in fact, was produced in '73, prior to all the works I've referenced.

This creepy, sensual gem from the writers of American Graffiti confounds us with its ambiguous tone, quiet frissons, and relentless invention. 

***

Keep your eye out for director Walter Hill in a cameo.