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Messiah of Evil

by Glenn Erickson Dec 05, 2023

How did two hot film students pass the time while waiting to become immortal as the writers of American Graffiti?  Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck wrote, produced and directed this minor horror classic, that along with its zombies and ghouls delivers intelligent art-movie cinematics. Marianna Hill, Royal Dano, Michael Greer, Joy Bang, Anitra Ford and Elisha Cook Jr. bring it all to life — and even its post-production woes couldn’t destroy its uniquely dreamlike charms. Have you ever bled from the eyes?  Been pursued by cannibals in a midnight supermarket?  You’ll be able to relate to the terror of the ill-defined ‘Blood Moon.’


Messiah of Evil
Blu-ray
Radiance
1973 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 90 min. / Revenge of the Screaming Dead; The Second Coming; Dead People / Street Date November 28, 2023 / Available from MVD Shop / 39.95
Starring: Michael Greer, Marianna Hill, Joy Bang, Anitra Ford, Royal Dano, Elisha Cook Jr., Charles Dierkop, Bennie Robinson, Walter Hill, B.W.L. Norton.
Cinematography: Stephen Katz
Stunts: Buddy Joe Hooker
Art Directors: Jack Fisk(e)
Murals by: Joan Mocine
Film Editor: Scott Conrad
Makeup Artist: Bud Miller
Music by: Phillan Bishop
Screenplay by Gloria Katz, Willard Huyck
Produced by Gloria Katz
Directed by
Willard Huyck

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.

 


 

Radiance’s Blu-ray of Messiah of Evil is billed as a new 2023 4K restoration. The insert booklet identifies the film source as ‘the best surviving element,’ a positive print held by the Academy Film Archive. Somewhere along the line its original negative was misplaced or discarded. The surviving 35mm print is in excellent condition. The movie was filmed in September ’71 but apparently was not released until 1974 — was it shelved until Huyck and Katz’s success provided added motivaton?  It bounced from its original makers to a number of releasing companies, that gave it different titles for theatrical release all the way until 1980 or so.

It needs to be stated that Messiah was filmed in the half-frame 35mm Techniscope format, that enlarges and squeezes the image to yield standard 35mm anamorphic ‘scope. The actual original negative would not be the same as the ‘original printing element,’ all of which would be an optical blow-up.

 

We previously reviewed a good Code Red DVD from 2009, but we haven’t seen The Film Detective’s 2015 DVD release. The Code Red DVD looks very good, but is often quite dirty and the color is highly variable. Radiance’s remaster steadies the picture, eliminates the dirt and improves the color throughout. It gives an impression of a sharper image, but it’s also true that numerous nighttime shots had difficulty finding focus in the less-forgiving Techniscope camera viewfinder. Did Huyck & Katz’s experience influence George Lucas to use Techniscope for American Graffiti?  We’ve always been told that ace cameraman Haskell Wexler was responsible for Graffiti’s terrific visual quality. Cinematographer Stephen Katz was no slacker himself, as his impressive credits bear out. And he is the brother of the late Gloria Katz!

Messiah could indeed have come from the pen of H.P. Lovecraft. Radiance’s extras lean heavily in the direction of academic interpretation. They begin with an excellent audio commentary from Kim Newman and Stephen Thrower, who explain that the very satisfying film is not exactly what its makers wanted. Thrower says that Katz and Huyck ran out of money before filming was complete. The money men reportedly locked them out of the editing room, but later (not so clear on this) brought them back for some of the patch-up work. Was the film’s prologue, a razor murder apparently taking place in Point Dune, invented at the last minute?  It happens outside the movie’s flashback framework. The asylum-centered flashback reminds us of the original  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, with a story structure identical to Don Siegel’s  Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

 

We also hear plenty about the film’s stellar art director Jack Fisk, who surely contributed greatly to the film’s arresting visuals. The strange murals in Joseph Lang’s house are said to have been painted by Gloria Katz’s artist roommate Joan Mocine. The blog Unnecessary Observations offers a nice study of the film’s unusual graphics.

Helping clear up some of these questions is a welcome 2019 audio interview with Willard Huyck. My playback had a few audio jumps that seemed to be digital micro-interruptions. A longform video docu by Radiance house producer Kat Ellinger gathers experts Guy Adams, Dr. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Dr. David Huckvale, Mikel J. Koven and Maitland McDonagh to wax academic over Messiah. Ms. Ellinger contributes a second equally academic study of the show with the intriguing title American Gothic and Female Hysteria.  Does a discerning feminist endorse or deplore the women’s roles in Messiah?  Watch and see.

 

The 28-page insert booklet is illustrated from feature frame grabs, suggesting that few advertising stills survive for Messiah. Bill Ackerman’s booklet essay delves into the film’s look, as influenced by other movies and famous artwork. The stark lit-but depopulated nighttime urban scenes cue a discussion of Edward Hopper.

I don’t know what extras are on the DVD from The Film Detective, but we still recommend the old Code Red disc. It has a commentary with both Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, and features encodings of two of their excellent student films. This pair didn’t get into film work because someone’s Daddy had industry connections — we easily understand how the pair attracted immediate interests from ‘venture capitalists’ and their film school associate George Lucas.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson


Messiah of Evil
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good
Video: Very Good
Sound: Very Good
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Kim Newman and Stephen Thrower
2019 Willard Huyck interview by Mike White from the Projection Booth Podcast (37 mins)
Documentary feature What the Blood Moon Brings: Messiah of Evil, A New American Nightmare
Visual essay American Gothic and Female Hysteria by Kat Ellinger (22 mins)
Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow
Limited edition booklet with writing by Bill Ackerman.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed:
December 2, 2023
(7037evil)

*   I got to see Elisha Cook perform his cameo scene in ‘1941’ sitting next to actor Douglas Fowley at a lonely diner. He turned his ‘drooling dotard’ persona on and off for each take, as if throwing a light switch: “I heard it from that radio, over there!”  Cook and Fowley are barely noticed in the final film. I sadly report that nobody paid proper attention to them on the set, either. They were patient and professional.

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About Glenn Erickson

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Glenn Erickson left a small town for UCLA film school, where his spooky student movie about a haunted window landed him a job on the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS effects crew. He’s a writer and a film editor experienced in features, TV commercials, Cannon movie trailers, special montages and disc docus. But he’s most proud of finding the lost ending for a famous film noir, that few people knew was missing. Glenn is grateful for Trailers From Hell’s generous offer of a guest reviewing haven for CineSavant.

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Chas Speed

There is a strange clip shown in a theater during “Messiah of Evil” of “Gone with the West”. That film has a lot in common with “Messiah of Evil” in that it was shot in 1969 and wasn’t released until 1974. It starred James Caan, Stephanie Powers, Sammy Davis Jr. and Aldo Ray. How on earth they got hold of this footage is anybody’s guess, but the footage of Sammy Davis Jr. shooting 3 people in a gunfight is priceless. This western makes even less sense than “Messiah of Evil”. The fact that the print I saw listed 6 editors should tell you something.

Chris

I have adored this film since I first saw a terrible copy from a Mill Creek 50-pack DVD set about 20 years ago. It was clear even from that crummy print that this was so much greater than much of the schlock that comprises those 50-packs. Even with parts that are likely tacked on (THE Walter Hill getting stabbed in the prologue), and with the plot-jumpiness of the final third of the movie, it remains a fascination. I know it’s not THAT deep, but it still feels like this movie has more to say than most 1970s horror films. I guess there’s something to say for fresh-from-film-school kids itching to show how talented they are and how many film references they can toss into a movie when handed the reins. And, yes, they absolutely nailed the casting. Michael Greer’s performance might be my favorite in the film; I can’t cite anything like it elsewhere. He apparently wished he could have been given more mainstream (and straight) roles, and I think it’s a shame that didn’t quite happen for his career. Finally, that fact that we can talk about this film in 2023 and draw a straight line to Killers of the Flower Moon via Jack Fisk is what I love about movies.

Last edited 1 year ago by Chris
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