Messiah of Evil

The 1970s came forth with a number of ‘disrupting’ horror films —  Last House on the Left shook up newspapers with ads that promised violence porn, while editorials nominated  The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as potential great art. Both films’ directors proceeded to extended careers. The industry knew that Grindhouse epics made money, but could they spawn important filmmakers for Hollywood?

The allure of obscurity.

Horror aficionados also lauded a few other productions that gathered strong reputations despite spotty distribution and little above-ground promotion. Word of mouth sustained the aura around Richard Blackburn’s Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural.  We only caught up with it much later, in impossibly blurry VHS bootleg tapes. A title in this category with a comparable aura is Messiah of Evil, which Robin Wood called one of the best movies of the decade. It was made by two film students near the core of the mid-1960s film-student rennaissance — the married Willard Huyck (USC) and Gloria Katz (UCLA) were a match made in heaven. An ambitious agent ‘discovered’ them at a school film screening night and set them up with some Texas ‘venture capital’ investors. Advanced $90,000, they could do whatever they wanted as long as the result was a commercial horror film.

Huyck & Katz first had to free themselves of another commitment that had stalled out. They had been chosen to write a movie for George Lucas, but the project had been been put on hold and seemed to be dying. Huyck & Katz chose to grab the Bird in the Hand, producing-writing-directing the horror movie. As it worked out, Lucas’s movie didn’t get back on track for months. When it geared up again H & K were able to pick up where they left off, thus writing one of the best movies of the decade, American Graffiti.

Antonioni and Dreyer and Resnais, Oh My.

Messiah of Evil is indeed a horror film, but one that probably didn’t please its investors. It’s an absorbing horror / art film, a ghost zombie flick with semi-abstrac leanings — a Vampyr for the 1970s. The movie rejects exploitation trends in search of weird moods, half-explained relationships. Art figures heavily in the film’s design and adds strongly to its visual impact. Huyck and Katz are fond of compositions that maroon living human figures against stylized mural backgrounds. Much of the movie plays out in a beach mansion cluttered with radical mural art. Careful framing and the use of mirrors emphasize the graphic aspect; sometimes the murals seem alive.

The film-study self-consciousness begins with the female protagonist, named after a noted French film character. In an asylum, Arletty Lang (Mariana Hill of Black Zoo,  Red Line 7000,  The Traveling Executioner, and  Medium Cool) wants to warn the world that it is in danger, but nobody believes her story. A flashback begins weeks or months earlier. Arletty drives at night to the remote California beach town of Point Dune. She wants to find out what’s gone wrong with her artist father Joseph (Royal Dano of  The Red Badge of Courage and  Man of the West); his only messages have warned Arletty to stay away. Nearing the town, she has an unsettling experience at a gas stop. After she leaves, the gas attendant (Charles Dierkop) is brutally murdered. Joseph’s beach house turns out to be lavish, spooky — and empty.

Arletty inquires after her father at a local art gallery, whose owner is blind. She’s directed to a motel, and three other non-locals. The wealthy and dissolute Thom (top-billed Michael Greer of Fortune and Men’s Eyes) claims to be researching a hundred year-old local legend dealing with a ‘Blood Moon’ and a demonic prophet known as The Stranger. Thom is interviewing Charlie (Elisha Cook Jr,) a local wino for whom the legend is a traumatic memory. Charlie prophesizes that Arletty will be forced to kill her own father.  (Top photo ↑ )

Thom travels with two female companions, the sultry Laura (Anitra Ford of The Longest Yard) and the underage Toni (Joy Bang of Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues). They later show up at the Lang beach house as uninvited guests, explaining that none of the motels in town would take them. Thom spots odd groups of locals tending bonfires on the beach. He is also soon hitting on Arletty, clearly to add her to his harem.

Artletty doesn’t throw them out. She’s being influenced by her father’s diary, in which he charts his mental disintegration. The atmosphere becomes even more oppressive as Arletty senses that she’s being affected by the same delirium. The jealous Laura decides to leave, and the bored Toni wanders out to see a movie alone. Each finds herself in terrible jeopardy. As explained by both Joseph Lang and Charlie, the centennial of the Blood Moon is nigh. As the citizens of Point Dune await the return of The Stranger, they become cannibalistic ghouls. The first symptom is bleeding from the eyes. Arletty also begins to succumb. In addition to bleeding from her eye and ear. She doesn’t feel a burn on her hand. She vomits beetles, worms and a lizard.

The uncanny Messiah of Evil makes a blessing of its limited resources — the mannered direction relies on master shots and arresting compositions. It doesn’t matter that Katz and Huyck don’t fully ‘set the scene’ in Point Dune — the empty streets and jet-black night exteriors gain shape and menace precisely because we our knowledge is mostly limited to what the four outsiders see.

The movie abounds in original horror set pieces. At the isolated gas station, Arletty is unaware that a pickup truck driven by a menacing albino (Bennie Robinson) carries a pair of mutilated dead bodies. Thom is trapped after midnight in a small town center of closed stores sporting neon signs, an Edward Hopper nightmare. In a brightly lit supermarket, Laura wanders down the empty aisles as if touring a museum of consumerism … until she comes upon a crowd of ghouls having a feast in the meat section. Although the film only suggests its cannibalistic details, the basic zombies-go-shopping concept predates George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.

It’s quite a production for $90 thousand, even in 1972. The setting feels a little unlikely — what California beach town was this isolated?  Filming took place in Malibu and a dozen local haunts that UCLA film students knew well. Why does the tiny Point Dune have an enormous Ralph’s Market suitable for a metropolis?  Some say that the Lang beach house is the same structure used 25 years before in the classic Mildred Pierce. Near the end we see the remains of a crumbling Santa Monica pier. Also immortalized is the exterior of the Fox Venice Theater on Lincoln Blvd., a frequent movie destination from our college years.

The movie also doesn’t lack for action, with zombies diving through windows and one character turned into a flaming torch. The burning man effect is always scary in low-budget movies, where we fear corners might be cut for safety. Huyck and Katz hired the reliable Buddy Joe Hooker to deliver the risky action.

The actual Marianna Hill and Michael Greer appear to be swim among those wave-battered pier pilings, and out in the deep water. These were committed actors.

Our identification with the assertive Arletty slips when she accepts, without explanation, the advances of the extraordinarily slimy Thom. Then she’s affected by a malaise that she fears is part of the Blood Moon curse. Some detectives take her to her father’s body on the beach, but she’s convinced that he is still alive, and refuses to leave. Joseph Lang’s portraits begin bleeding from the eyes, just as do the cursed townspeople.

Dreamlike ‘incomplete’ scenes encourage the feeling of a hallucination, but the film’s only wrong turn is the introduction of ‘The Dark Stranger’ in a century-old flashback. Although it features director B.W.L. Norton (Cisco Pike) the scene goes nowhere. It would have been better communicated with just Royal Dano’s narration — his evocative voice is GOLD. Skirting script material apparently left unfilmed, the choppy ending includes a final zombie assault and an escape into the ocean.

Artsy but not pretentious, Messiah of Evil’s gallery of creepy moments maintains a cinematic balance. In the fragmented third act, the supernatural ‘Dark Stranger’ is linked to the cannibalism of the historical Donner Party. Even with this fumbled back story, the show is more interesting than many ‘legit’ efforts of the early ’70s, when Hammer films lost their way and Hollywood horrors were wasting our time with two-headed transplants and campy vampires.

Mariana Hill is excellent as always; her quiet reactions makes much of the weirdness believable. Michael Greer’s presence is a clever move — casting an actor typed as gay as a straight hedonist makes Thom entirely ‘unreadable.’ Fans will enjoy seeing Anitra Ford (Invasion of the Bee Girls) in a more rounded performance than is usual. Cult actress Joy Bang is at the end of her short film career, at age 25.

Elisha Cook Jr. could have performed his entire role in an hour. Although he delivers exactly what Messiah of Evil needs, we wish he weren’t once again playing a wild-eyed neurotic vagrant.  ^*  The great Royal Dano is also present for only one scene, but his narration anchors the film’s supernatural premise. His voice compels us to pay attention to the backstory about Blood Moons and mysterious strangers. When the maddened artist shows up in the flesh, Dano goes whole hog with his performance, covering himself in paint until his head is a blue blob. We can only hope that it was water-based and harmless.