(Spoilers.) Oh, baby! Baby you make me hot and bothered, the way you do the things you do... and Messiah of Evil, you do it good. We are on our knees, mouths agape, sweaty and quivering, in awe of what we see. Reputations are hard to live up to, but Messiah, you really do! You are an unstuffed D-Cup on a wonderfully lithe body or ten inches on a hairless and muscular one. Baby, your ten is a full ten of ten, and your cup runneth over! Whoever knew something so easy to get would be so good — Messiah is currently streetwalking on YouTube, and probably at your favorite streaming site as well. For a movie that so few have taken advantage of, Messiah gets around. But if you decide you want to enjoy Messiah of Evil as well, may we suggest you shop around: as always with web freebees, the quality of the transfer (not to mention the actual cut of the movie itself) can vary. And who wants sloppy seconds when you can get something pristine?
Trailer to
Messiah of Evil:
Way back on 22 May 2011, the beautiful former actress Anitra Ford — on the cover of the magazine below — wrote in her now long inactive blog, "Shot in 1971, [Messiah of Evil] was originally titled The Second Coming. Towards the end of the filming, investors pulled their money out, and the film was never finished. A Frenchman bought the unedited footage, edited it and released the movie under the title of Messiah of Evil'. [...]"
Interesting story, and it would explain why the movie was only released after the duo who wrote and directed it, William Huyk and Gloria Katz (25 Oct 1942 – 25 Nov 2018), had the enormous success of writing the '70s classic American Graffiti* (1973 / trailer): when someone suddenly becomes famous and successful, incomplete or forgotten non-viable projects of the past suddenly become commercially viable and worth digging up. (Party at Kitty and Stud's [1970 / trailer], anyone?) And while we doubt that it is due alone to the fact that a European bought and edited the footage, it is noticeable that the overall aura and tone of Messiah of Evil is far closer to the arty Euro-horrors of the time than the average linear and straightforward American horror movie.
* Huyk and Katz went on to script a little film known as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984 / trailer), and then solidified their standing as major players with internationally respected message movie, Howard the Duck (1986 / trailer). They also scribed the much maligned and now forgotten comedy Radioland Murders (1994 / trailer), a movie that would make a great double feature with Sam Rami's much maligned and now forgotten but truly visual comedy Crimewave (1985 / trailer).
The opening scene of Messiah of Evil is pretty much indicative of how the entire movie plays out. We see a terrified man (Walter Hill*) fleeing down a deserted street, apparently desperate to escape from something unknown, when he falls exhausted to the ground. A garden door opens, and there stands a young girl, and soon the man is in the yard, lying on his back, in an uncomfortable scene that plays out as if the apparently legally under-age girl is about to get it on with the adult man — but then she pulls out a straight razor and slits his throat. Everything about the prologue is slightly off: as "normal" as the nighttime location might be, the events transpire as if as if seen through a drug-induced haze or as if it is all a dream. It looks and feels "real" even as it conveys an odd otherworldliness. And this otherworldliness, this odd dreamlike sensation, infuses the movie from start to finish. The result is a horror movie like few others,** if only because the overriding aura of irreality not only engenders a continually rising sense of dread and discomfort but also makes the at-times elliptical and convoluted narrative work.
* Yes, that Walter Hill: the director of a wasted life faves such as The Driver (1978 / trailer), The Warriors (1979 / trailer), The Long Riders (1980 / trailer), Southern Comfort (1981 / trailer), Red Heat (1988 / trailer), and Last Man Standing (1996 / trailer). His brief appearance in Messiah of Evil is, to date, his only known appearance onscreen.
** The person we were watching Messiah of Evil with promptly brought up Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971 / trailer) as spiritually related, while we ourselves sensed a spiritual link to a much older cinematic oddity, Dementia (1955), a.k.a. Daughter of Horror, a wasted life's Short Film of the Month for July 2020.
The supernatural horror of the Messiah of Evil transpires in the fictional town of Point Dune, somewhere on the California coast. We learn early that the main narrator of the movie, Arletty Lange (Marianna Hill,* below not from the film), is an unreliable narrator: an inmate in an asylum, the surrealistic atmosphere that permeates the movie could well be a reflection of her own mental state. Did all that she tells us truly happen, or are the events nothing but discomforting figments of her imagination, her psychosis? (And if it did happen, how did she know what transpired where and when she was not present?)
* Ms. Hill is found in a number of intriguing movies, including the uncomfortable Schizoid (1980 / trailer), the a wasted life fave Blood Beach [1980 / trailer, with Lavelle Roby], the iconoclastic High Plains Drifter [1973 / trailer], the decidedly odd The Baby [1973 / trailer], and Black Zoo [1963 / trailer, with Michael Gough]). She eventually left Hollyweird for Great Britain, where she taught acting for years, and one assumes she must be retired by now. In a 2016 interview at the dead blogsspot Hill Place, and much like Anitra Ford on her dead blogspot, Ms. Hill seems incapable of expressing a bad thought about anybody...
Arletty recalls her trip to Point Dune in search of her artist father Joseph (iconic character actor Royal Dano [16 Nov 1922 – 15 May 1994]); but he has disappeared and no one knows anything about him. She takes up residence in her father's beachside house, amidst his oddly disquieting paintings of anonymously generic but priggish-looking men and women — later, many of the townspeople, in their almost retro-looking conservative clothing, call the paintings back to mind. She is soon joined by an unusual trio consisting of an almost sugar-daddy-like Thom (Michael Greer* [20 Apr 1943 – 14 Sept 2002]), who sports an impressively healthy-haired and ugly haircut that looks to be the one Trump modeled his own scraggily orange mop after, and his two playthings, the nymphet Toni (Joy Bang**) and coolly beautiful Laura (Anitra Ford of Dirty O'Neil [1974 / trailer], the trash classic Invasion of the Bee Girls [1973 / trailer], Andy Sidaris's Stacey [1973 / trailer] and Jack Hill's The Big Bird Cage [1972 / trailer, with Carol Speed). The way the three suddenly just move in with Arletty is yet another one of many asides throughout the movie that are, when objectively weighed, extremely peculiar, and that follow a dream logic in which odd behavior is presented as if normal.
* Michael Greer remains oddly unsung in LGBTQ film history, but he was one of the first openly gay actors in Hollywood to have a semi-successful career. He made his feature film debut in The Gay Deceivers (1969 / trailer), put on the makeup again for Fortune and Men's Eyes (1971 / clip) and appeared in, among others, the sexploitation flicks The Curious Female (1970 / German trailer) and Summer School Teachers (1974 / trailer, with Dick Miller).
** Saddled with a porn star name — real by first marriage — Ms. Bang had a short career that spanned from independent NYC projects like Events (1970 / trailer), Brand X (1970) and Norman Mailer's Maidstone (1970 / full film) to slightly more a wasted life-appropriate movies like Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971 / trailer, with William Campbell) and Night of the Cobra Woman (1972 / trailer). For whatever reason, soon after taking part in Play It Again, Sam (1972), Ms. Wener Bang gave up Hollyweird to become a nurse in the Midwest. Currently, she might be single... [BTW: Ever play the "Porn Star Name Game"? Take the name of your first pet and the name of the first street you remember living on — for most people, that would also be the street they grew up on — and combine them. That's your porn star name. In our case, we would be Shoo-Shoo King.)
The characters of the movie seem often driven less by motivation than capriciousness, and one seldom truly understands why they do the things they do — for example, when Laura leaves, her motivation (jealousy and boredom) is clear, but the way she literally walks open-eyed to her demise is almost unreal. Preceded by a bizarre and terrifying ride with rat-eating albino (Bennie Robinson), her long subsequent solitary walk and ultimate fate in the most mundane locations — a big food store — are all the things nightmares are made of. A great scene that illustrates how beneath the façade of the ordinary that one knows, the deadly can hide. This threat of the ordinary is intensified in the later, dreadful and suspenseful scene in which a bored Toni is watching a movie — bizarrely disjointed scenes supposedly taken from a western titled Gone with the West (1974 / full movie) — in the local cinema.
Messiah of Evil is well worth searching out and watching. True, it often does not really make sense and is definitely convoluted and illogical, but it nevertheless manages to truly impress with its surreal and arty and creepy atmosphere, and some scenes are truly indelible and chilling. Whether or not all that transpires is "real" or the fantasies of an unreliable narrator is almost immaterial; what matters is that the movie truly stands out as a one-of-a-kind horror movie, a truly individualistic and unique movie that might not terrify you but will slowly eat away at your nerves and infest you with growing dread and discomfort. You might say "WTF?" at the end — we sure did — but you will also definitely not feel like you've wasted your time. A great movie.
Another a.k.a. title of the movie appears to be Return of the Living Dead... but it's not the Return of the Living Dead that we all know (1985 / trailer).
Below, an advertisement of Messiah of Evil from December 1975, when it was part of a double feature at the Jackson, Mississippi, Showtown West Drive-in with the Italian giallo The Devil Has Seven Faces (1971)...
Trailer to
The Devil Has Seven Faces:
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