Using some of the same sets from Hercules and the Conquest of Atlantis, Mario Bava (Blood and BlackLace, Black Sunday) created a masterpiece with this film. Featuring Reg Park (who appeared in four Hercules films and was considered a mentor to Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Christopher Lee (The Satanic Rites of Dracula, The Wicker Man, everything good and right about horror movies), this would influence every sword and sandal movie that would follow, as well as films like Flash Gordon.
Despite the size of the budget and the cheapness of the sets, Bava crafts a totally unique world, filled with rich colors and billowing smoke. And with Lee as King Lico, there’s finally a villain that feels worthy of Hercules’ bold heroics.
As Hercules returns from many adventures, he discovers that the love of his life, Princess Deianira, has lost her memory. Unbeknownst to him, Lico is responsible. Working with the forces of the underworld, he wants her for himself (and Hercules out of the way). He sends Hercules, Theseus and Telemachus on a suicide mission to steal the Stone of Forgetfulness from a small island within a lake of fire. For love, Hercules will dare anything, diving headfirst into what normal men fear.
Indulge me in hyperbole for a moment, but Bava could be seen as very much the same. He made a bet with himself on this film, “attempting to shoot it with one segmented wall containing doors and windows and four movable columns.” Facing down a challenge and attempting to outdo the past Steve Reeves Hercules films while crafting a visual style all his own — Bava exceeds expectations here.
To me, the heart of the film is the differences between Hercules and Theseus. Hercules is driven by duty, devotion and love, while Theseus is addicted to new experiences, whether they be violent or sexual. When he is turned against Hercules, you know that our hero will forgive him, no matter what. His strength goes beyond physical — it extends to his heart.
There’s a scene in the film where the Queen of the Hesperides tells Hercules this advice: “Believe only what you do, not what you think you see.” That’s a perfect thought for this film. You may see fake rocks, silly costumes and a goofy plot. Or you can enjoy this film’s simple pleasures, wild colors and otherworldly feel.
There’s always a divide in how I see movies and how others do, which often leads me to not always want to share a film. Do you know what I mean? I honestly adore a film like Holy Mountain or The Beyond, but I know that by telling someone who isn’t willing to accept some of the faults, to simply see it as a dumb movie instead of a treasured story, I’m just going to get upset. This L.A. Weekly article sums it so well. Bava was operating on a small budget, with a small script, but delivered beyond measure. A story where one of the main characters must realize that in order to find true happiness for all, he must give up his own happiness? That’s deeper than the papier-mâché boulders and wooden performances here hint at.
Within the confines of what is expected, Bava is able to move us, to inspire us, to wow us, to take us to another, better world — one filled with smoke and lava and neon and beauty. We are limited now by the fact that every film must look perfect and clean and realistic. I’ll take one Hercules in the Haunted World over every movie that will play in moviehouses this year.
UPDATE: You can watch this for free on Amazon Prime.
Do you need to love, trust and care about the hero of the movie? Mario Bava is here with Hatchet for the Honeymoon in an attempt to craft a story where the hero is the absolute worst person in the entire film.
Meet John Harrington. He’s 30, runs a bridal dress factory, lives in a gorgeous villa near Paris and kills young women to overcome his impotence and Oedipus complex. His wife, Mildred, refuses to divorce him. And he’s instantly smitten with Helen (Dagmar Lassander, Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, The House by the Cemetery), a young model who has come to replace a missing girl.
Why is she missing? She was one of the models at the salon who John took a liking to, giving her one of his dresses for her wedding. The moment she tried it on, he hacked her up with a meat cleaver, burned her corpse and used it to fertilize the plants in his greenhouse.
Inspector Russell knows that something isn’t quite right. After all, how can six models disappear from the same dress company? If only there was some evidence…
John, however, is falling in love with Helen. And he finally decides to do something about his wife. That something entails him putting on a wedding dress and killing her. But there’s one problem. Here’s where Bava twists the film from giallo into supernatural territory: she won’t stay dead.
While John can’t see or hear his wife, everyone else can. Even after burning her remains and placing them in a handbag, she keeps coming back. He takes the handbag with him to a club, where an attempt to bring another woman home fails when she sees his wife. Beaten by a bouncer and ejected, he cannot even use his charms to win over women. He throws his wife’s ashes into the night, but she remains with him
If John can’t be happy, at least he can murder Helen. He convinces her to wear a wedding dress and tells her that he never wanted to hurt her. She avoids the final blow of his cleaver, which unlocks a flashback where we learned the truth: John loved his mother and that love grew as he became the man of the house after his father’s death. But when she remarried — and started having sex again — he couldn’t take it and murdered her and her new husband. His mind erased the evidence until now.
Helen was an undercover cop all along, leading Inspector Russell and his men back to arrest John. While being transported to prison, he’s happy knowing that his many trials are over. Then, to his horror, he sees the handbag and notices his wife sitting next to him. Now, he’s the only person who can see her. She promised to be with him forever, even in Hell. He goes insane before accepting his fate.
Hatchet for the Honeymoon predates the slasher, yet many of its conventions can be found here and in other early Bava works. This film is a masterwork of both style and substance, with gorgeous fashion, sets and camerawork creating a gorgeous tableau. I love the scene where John uses Bava’s Black Sunday, playing on the TV, as an excuse for the screams that come from his apartment. And as his wife’s blood drips down onto the ground floor, it’s almost as if Bava dares you to empathize with a hero who is completely contemptible. What a predicament to be in!
Sometimes, you end up loving a movie for what it could be way more than for what it is.
Popcorn would be one of those films.
Buried somewhere in its slasher framing story and four films within a film, there are some great ideas that should have been explored further. And the closer the film gets to its conclusion, the more it starts to explain itself. I’m more in the John Carpenter camp when it comes to too much information — I’m often just fine not needing to know every motivation of a film’s villain. To wit — I don’t need to know that Michael Myers made papier-mache masks to assuage his pain. I don’t even need to know that he’s a human being. I just want the story to thrill me.
Popcorn was filmed entirely in Kingston, Jamaica — which explains the later dance numbers. That’s right. Dance numbers. The more you watch this film, the more incongruous it becomes. The production was also fraught with changes, as Alan Ormsby was originally the film’s director, before being replaced by Porky’s actor Mark Herrier several weeks into filming.
Ormsby has a crazy bio — in addition to working with Bob Clark on Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, Deranged and Death Dream, he also wrote Paul Schrader’s remake of Cat People and My Bodyguard. And strangely, he’s also credited with creating Kenner’s 1975 action figure Hugo: Man of a Thousand Faces!
At the same time, Jill Schoelen (The Stepfather) replaced original lead, Amy O’Neill. In fact, Schoelen barely was in scenes with the rest of the cast because so much had already been filmed, so she mostly appeared in reshoots! Even the title had something to do with a plot element that was edited from the final film, but the producers and distributor liked it so much, it was retained.
The film begins with Maggie Butler (Schoelen), an aspiring movie writer and college student, who has recurring nightmares that she is a young girl named Sarah. These dreams — in which a strange man stalks her — happen so often that she has an audio diary of them. Those very same dreams may or may not be connected to the prank phone calls that her mom Suzanne (Dee Wallace Stone, The Howling, E.T., Critters and many more) has been getting.
Sarah is also dating Mark (Derek Rydall, Eric from Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge), who tries to get her to come to his dorm room. She can’t — the script that she’s writing based on her dreams is more important. And so is the all-night horrorthon (JOIN US FOR THE HORRO-RITUAL!) that the school’s film department is putting on. It’s all Toby D’Amato’s (Tom Villard, who was one of the first 90s actors to openly admit that he was dying from AIDS) idea — with the goal of purchasing new editing equipment. NOTE: One assumes that Toby is named for Joe D’Amato, director of Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Antropophagus, Absurd, Troll 2 and the Ator the Fighting Eagle series, plus 200 or more films.
The kids convert the Dreamland Theater — due to be destroyed in three weeks — with the help of Professor Davis (Tony Roberts, Annie Hall, Amityville 3-D) and a quick cameo from Ray Walston as Dr. Mnesyne, the provider of the props that will go with the films.
Ah, those films — these movies-within-a-movie provide the best part of Popcorn. They are:
Mosquito: This 3-D film is a tribute to nature gone wild and nuclear terror movies of the 1950s. Even better, it pays tribute to Emergo, the technology (well, as far as sliding a skeleton down a rope can be called technology) that William Castle used to gimmick up The House on Haunted Hill.
The Attack of the Amazing Electrified Man: A callback to films like The Amazing Colossal Man, while at the same time it’s a nod to German expressionistic camera angles (certainly an odd blend). There’s a great scene here where the Electrified Man battles a gang of greasers armed with switchblades. There’s another gimmick here called “Shock-o-Scope” which is another tribute to William Castle and his film The Tingler.
The Stench: This is obviously a dubbed Japanese film, ala The Green Slime, but with the added gimmick of Odorama. There have been actual movies that use this technology, such as Scent of Mystery and, more dear to this author’s heart, John Waters’ Polyester.
Possessor: Found within Dr. Mnesyne’s — his name translates as memory — equipment, this short film is the most interesting part of Popcorn. It’s supposed to be a snuff film made by a Mansonesque cult of acidheads, but it looks and feels like something straight out of José Mojica Marins’ oeuvre (known as Coffin Joe, he’s made some of the strangest and best-titled films ever, such as At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul and This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse). Seriously, this strange little film, in which a voice just says “possessor” over and over and over while blood fills the screen is awesome. If only the rest of the film — and one scene I’ll get to shortly — had been as imaginative and odd as this, we’d have a real winner on our hands.
Just by watching Possessor, Maggie passes out and has another nightmare. Upon awakening, Professor Davis informs the class that the film comes from Lanyard Gates (Bruce Glover, father of Crispin Hellion Glover), the leader of the aforementioned cult who ended his final film by killing his family onstage while the theater burned down in flames around the audience. There were no survivors and no explanation for why the film survived.
As Maggie grows more and more obsessed with the film, her mother becomes upset, telling her to just quit the film festival. That night, her mother gets a call from Lanyard Gates, telling her to meet him at the festival and to bring a gun.
The next day, when Maggie mans the box office, a man buys a ticket and calls her Sarah. She freaks, thinking it’s Gates. Meanwhile, just as the Professor is about to launch the mosquito prop during the film cue, a shadowy figure takes control of it, impaling him. Then, we see the same figure making a mask of the dead man’s face.
Oh yeah — Maggie’s mom shows up to the theater with a gun and in the best scene of the film, Gates takes over reality, transforming the marquee to read “POSSESSOR.” That said — this scene has NOTHING to do with the rest of the film, as our villain has no such psychic or reality warping powers.
No one will believe Maggie’s story and the films continue. A student named Tina (Freddie Marie Simpson, who along with Megan Cavanagh and Tracy Reiner, appeared in both the movie and TV series A League of Their Own) has been having an affair with the Professor, whose doppelganger kills her and then uses her body to electrocute wheelchair bound Bud while he sets off the buzzing seats during the next film.
When Maggie finds his body, she runs into Gates and has a flashback. Turns out that she’s really his daughter, Sarah Gates and Suzanne is not her mother, but her aunt who saved her. She tells all to Toby, who turns out to not be Gates, but his imitator. He was badly burned at the only showing of Possessor and holds Maggie and her aunt responsible. He prepares them both for his final act…of murder!
While setting up the Odorama, Leon is killed by Toby (but not before he pees all over him), yet he stops from killing Joanie when she confesses her unrequited love for him — an odd choice for a slasher film.
Whew. There are so many unnecessary characters and extra girlfriends and weird asides like a landlord who wants to be an actor which, honestly, take away from the film. Long story short, Toby reenacts the end of Possessor to the jeers of the crowd, revealing his full face — a gruesome visage of wires and burned flesh. Luckily, he’s killed by the Mosquito prop just in time to save everyone — which is either a cheap repeat or a previous kill or a sly comment on sequels. Let’s go with the former. That said — it has a really nice pre-Go Pro mounted camera effect as Toby dies, but not before hearing the cheers of the crowd.
Honestly, Popcorn is a mess. But it’s an enjoyable mess. It’s simultaneously a tribute to 1950s black and white gimmick films while attempting to be meta commentary on the slasher genre, with none of the teeth of a film like Scream. There are ridiculous parts, like death by toilet and a way too long musical number where a reggae band plays while a cosplay heavy crowd dances and Toby going from quiet kid to Freddy Krueger clone in the too quick conclusion to the tale. Throw in a balls out bonkers end song — “Scary Scary Movies” — that features lyrics like “psycho on the move got a blade two feet long, kisses for his wife while he slices the bitch….so long!” screamed at the top the rapper’s lungs and you have something worth watching.
As an aside, the rapper Kabal has been doing entire albums of cheesy rap songs from horror movies. He even covered the theme from Popcorn!
There’s a heart and inventiveness to the film. There’s a real love for movies in here, particularly the fun promotional style of William Castle. It’s definitely worth a watch, as the 90 minute or so runtime practically flies by. And while this film was impossible to find for years, Synapse Pictures has finally released a Blu Ray, so no need to buy bootlegs!
Anne (Lina Romay, muse of this film’s director, Jess Franco) is a performance artist who specializes in recreating Satanic rituals and spicing them up for old rich folks to savor. She also writes for a magazine, Garter and Dagger, that appeals to people who like this kind of dreck.
Turns out that Mathis, one of the writers at the magazine (yep, Franco himself), was a priest kicked out of the church for following Old Testament beliefs instead of Vatican 2. After overhearing Anne and her assistant planning a Black Mass (not an actual one, more like a sex party, which come to think of it, why is a man of the cloth working for a porn magazine? And wouldn’t an orgy be just as bad as a Black Mass?), Mathis kills each and every person involved.
There’s another cut of the film, Demoniac, which is just death and gore with none of the sex. It’s 69 minutes long. And there’s another version called Sexorcismes that remakes this film with added hardcore footage, including Franco himself showing up for the party. And Franco remade it again as El Sádico de Notre-Dame.
Under any title, this movie is the absolute shits. It fails at horror. It fails at being sexy. It fails at being interesting. It even fails at being an Exorcist clone because it has nothing to do with exorcism!
Look — when I tell you a movie is bad, trust me. It’s bad. Real bad.
Seriously — I found a movie about Satanic sex crimes boring. If that’s not a recommendation to avoid, I don’t know what is!
Don’t watch this. Even if it’s free on Amazon Prime.
Among the many tasty offerings in the new issue, your humble author was proud to contribute a way too long article about Rats: The Night of Terror! Ordering info soon!
I wonder, quite often, why hasn’t there been a new Friday the 13th for nearly 9 years? Then I watched every single one of the films, back to back to back (and back) and I can tell you that they’re endless repetitive movies that ended up relying on gimmicks to get by. Is there a new idea that can make them fresh (yes, there is Hollywood, comment right here to get my ideas)? Has anyone even asked Jason Vorhees if he even wants to come back?
Unmasked part 25 is all about Jackson, a serial killing maniac with a hockey mask who is tired of killing. He can’t even remember why he started killing, other than a horrible childhood that he feels absolves himself of all guilt. Nothing makes sense until he meets Shelly, a blind girl who makes him see that there can be more to life than ripping out peoples’ hearts.
The world knows so much about Jackson’s life that his murders have been filmed in a series of films called Unmasked (or Hand of Death, if you’re watching the film’s other title. This makes no sense when we get to the marquee at the end, but I doubt they had the budget to film that scene twice.). His father was a killer too, one who could have been the world’s greatest if only he had the heart to kill his wife and son. Instead, they moved to America, where Jackson was believed dead after drowning at a summer camp (if you didn’t get the reference, this is so not the film for you). Now, he lives with his drunkard of a father who constantly laments the days when he was a killing machine and how bad of a son he has.
Shelly offers an escape — as a blind woman, she can’t see his scarred face. She even understands his need to wear a mask at all times. In fact, she blindly — pardon the pun — understands everything that Jackson throws at her.
Unmasked part 25 is a wildly uneven film to say the least and perhaps that’s part of its charm. At times, like when Shelly is trying to introduce Jackson (clad in red boxers with “bad boy” written on the ass) to BDSM, it’s played like a broad comedy. At other times, such as when he reads her Byron or talks about how everyone wearing a mask at Halloween angers him, it reaches a grimy paw at the heartstrings. And there are also moments — like when Jackson literally tears a man’s face off (played by Christian Brando, whose ill-fated life could have been a horror movie) — it’s a straight-up slasher movie with more than decent special effects.
Once Jackson learns that Shelly is pregnant with his child and that the more time he spends around normal people, the more he wants to kill. As the film spirals to its downbeat ending, the masked killer learns that he can never walk away from his fate, not when there’s an Unmasked part 26 on the marquee.
Unmasked part 25 has some moments that made me cringe — the BDSM scene is played for laughs and Jackson can’t understand why his partner would enjoy sex and roughness together, yet he can only be aroused after killing. It’s an oversimplification of a much more complicated mindset, but then again, you don’t watch gore movies for subtext, right? But it’s also way better than you’d expect, attempting to tie the murders of a masked maniac to the real world. It’s also never been released on DVD, so if you want it, you’re going to have to search iOffer or eBay.
UPDATE: If any label was goign to get this on blu ray, it was going to be Vinegar Syndrome. Run to your internet device and order this NOW!
A movie about a socially awkward, totally obsessed film fan whose love of old films borders on the obsessive, with nights filled with movie after movie after movie? This one hits a little too close to home.
Eric Binford (Dennis Christopher, Breaking Away) works in a Los Angeles film distributor warehouse by day and watches movies by night. He’s the guy I was referring to earlier — someone so into movies he gets bullied by his family and co-workers. And when he meets Marilyn O’Connor, who looks like Marilyn Monroe, he finally finds someone whose looks are similar to the movie ideal that life does not always achieve. Or maybe he’s just so crazy that when he sees her, he goes into a fantasy fugue state and only sees what his brain will allow him to see.
Somehow, Eric is able to ask her out, but she stands him up by accident. This makes him go completely out of his mind, transforming himself into various film icons to destroy his enemies.
First, he re-enacts Kiss of Death by pushing his Aunt Stella (who is really his mother) down the steps, showing up to her funeral as Tommy Udo, the role Richard Widmark played in the film. No one gets it. No one has seen the movies that Eric loves. There is no one to discuss them with. They can’t even put her grave next to Marilyn Monroe’s grave in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery.
Eric then becomes Count Dracula, attending a midnight showing of Night of the Living Dead. Eric then goes to Marilyn’s house in a scene that’s taken from Psycho. She screams, he drops his pen into the water and the ink becomes the blood. “I only wanted your autograph,” he yells as he runs.
Eric then goes back to find a hooker who had been rude to him. He chases her, she falls and dies, then he drinks her blood. Obviously, Eric has not seen Martin. Actually, the way this scene is intercut with scenes from old black and white horror films, I am certain that the makers of this film have seen Romero’s vampire film.
Now that Eric has gone this far, why not dress up as Hopalong Cassidy and kill off Richie (Mickey Rourke in an early role), a co-worker who bullies him.
Oh yeah — Tim Thomerson is a criminal psychologist who is working with a policewoman (they’re having sex, because 1980 and all) to find what he believes is a serial killer. The big problem is that his captain wants all the glory for himself.
Eric talks to his aunt as if she were still alive, then after watching Halloween (producer Irwin Yablans also produced that film), he pleasures himself to a photo of Marilyn Monroe.
Eric’s dream has been to own his own movie theater and to make his own movie. He tells a sleazeball named Gary Bially his idea, Alabama and the Forty Thieves and you get the feeling not much good can come of it.
Eric’s boss fires him and won’t allow him back into work to get his posters. As his everyday self, even when trying to talk like a movie character, Eric is impotent. But when he’s dressed as The Mummy, he can frighten his boss into a heart attack.
After seeing Gary Bially on a talk show, talking up the movie Eric created as his own, Eric shows up to the producer’s birthday party. Dressed as James Cagney’s character from White Heat, he fires a submachine gun at everyone in the room before killing the man who stole from him.
The cops are on to Eric, but he’s hired Marilyn for a photo shoot and is all set to re-enact The Prince and the Showgirl when Thomerson’s character arrives. Eric runs to Mann’s Chinese Theater and makes it to the roof before dying just like Cagney in White Heat, yelling, “Made it, ma! Top of the world!”
Writer and director Vernon Zimmerman also created Unholy Rollers, but this movie is way beyond that. It shows how only seeing the world as the movies can be a danger to yourself and everyone else. Eric goes from shy and withdraw to dark and mean by the end of the movie, as he slowly becomes a new character. I wonder what he would have thought about the movie that they made his life into?
You can catch this on Amazon Prime. You should do so right now.
Some slashers take their time getting to the first kill. Others start James Bond style, with a kill or two at the beginning before settling into the formula. Don’t Go in the Woods starts with murder and never stops. There are characters you’re supposed to get behind. But mostly, there are just random people who are killed in increasingly horrific ways while comedic synthesizer music bleets and boops and at times, goes silent. It’s a crude, brutal and at times, hilarious film. It also feels like it was made by either amateurs or maniacs. Maybe both.
There is one rule in this movie: Don’t go in the woods. Every single person that dies ignores this rule, so they are to blame for whatever happens next.
A woman screams and is killed.
A bird watcher watches birds and is killed.
Four friends — Peter, Joanne, Ingrid and Craig — are traveling through the woods.
A tourist is thrown over a waterfall, landing near our heroes having a splash fight (they don’t notice). Our intrepid foursome set up camp for the evening as two honeymooners in an RV are killed, followed by an artist being offed and her daughter kidnapped.
Of note here — it seems like the couples should be boy/girl, but through a combination of outfits and hairstyles, it is truly up to you to determine the non-binary combinations that they may be.
Two more campers get killed, then Peter watches while a fisherman is slaughtered, finally revealing the antagonist, who is a wild man covered in rags and fur with a big spear, known only as Maniac in the credits. He runs to warn his friends, but the Maniac follows and kills Craig with a spear.
Peter and Ingrid finally find the Maniac’s cabin, but accidentally stab a hitchhiker they believe is the killer. Our two heroes — minus the missing Joanne — make it to the hospital where they alert authorities, including the Sheriff (Ken Carter, a career rock ‘n roll DJ), who might as well be the cousin of Troll 2‘s Sheriff Gene Freak.
Peter feels guilty about leaving Joanne behind. As for her, she wanders into the Maniac’s house and is killed via multiple machete strikes. The killer doesn’t stop, beheading a man in a wheelchair, before Peter and Ingrid find him and go full on crazy, stabbing him numerous times while an entire crowd of lawmen watches.
Meanwhile, that kidnapped baby everyone forgot about? She’s up in the woods with an axe, all alone and ready to grow up to be the next Maniac.
Whew. This movie is a whirlwind of dubbed dialogue, bright red ketchup made with BBQ sauce and red food coloring, all shot on $400 worth of film stock (look for light bleeding through at numerous times).
Director James Bryan is a jack of all trades, having worked as an editor, a production manager, a post-production supervisor, a director of photography, a production assistant and more. He even filmed the pick-up shots for Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural! Plus, his resume includes films as diverse as The Executioner, Part II and sex films like Sex Aliens and The Hottest Show in Town.
Should you watch it? It depends. Are you willing to endure some of the worst dialogue and outfits in the history of film — all non-ironically created, mind you — and enjoy a story that makes no logical sense? Then yes. You should watch this on Shudder!
After all, how can you dislike a movie that ends with a song like this?
Between Ed Sanders’ book The Family — which examines the origins of Manson’s Family — and Maury Terry’s The Ultimate Evil — which suggests that a worldwide network of Satanists is responsible for the Manson family and Son of Sam murders, we’ve come to accept the notion of an organized army of evil. But who are they?
In the revised 2002 edition of The Family, Sanders referenced the Process Chuch of the Final Judgement as the “satanic group of English origin” behind these killings. The Process successfully sued Sanders’ publisher to remove this reference.
That said the die was cast. By 1980, books like Michelle Remembers suggested a deep conspiracy of Satanic ritual abuse. The Satanic Panic of the 80’s found sacrifice and worship around every corner. Perhaps the author you’re reading now was targeted. Yet no real evidence has ever been found.
Michele Soavi’s The Sect concerns that network of Satan as they prepare the way for the Antichrist. From a commune being slaughtered in the early 1970’s — a scene with references to the Rolling Stones that repeat throughout the film — to multiple modern murders that follow, including a heart being left on a train and a suicide in public, the devil’s helpers are organized, know how to plan and are well ahead of the rest of society.
Just a note — as cheesy as Sympathy for the Devil reads today — The Rolling Stones were at the forefront of the occult 60’s thanks to their association with Kenneth Anger. If you’re interested in learning more, I’d heartily recommend Gary Lachman’s Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius.
But let’s get back to The Sect. In modern Germany, schoolteacher Miriam Kreisl (Kelly Curtis, sister of Jamie Lee) saves Moebius Kelly (Herbert Lom, Hammer’s The Phantom of the Opera) after an accident and brings him back to her house. Within a few hours, he’s injecting her and shoving beetles up her nose while she sleeps and giving her nightmares of a giant bird having sex with her.
From there, the film descends into more of a series of nightmares than a fixed narrative. That makes sense once you realize that its origins in three different scripts that producer Dario Argento, director Michele Soavi and writer Gianni Romoli couldn’t finish. So you’re left with a film with a giant glowing blue gateway to Hell in the basement, a plot to conceive the Antichrist much like Rosemary’s Baby, an evil Shroud of Turin that can kill and bring people back from the dead and, oh yeah, a super smart rabbit named Rabbit who can use a TV remote.
The Sect has some references to other films, with the first victim being named Marion Crane (Psycho) and another named Martin Romero (obviously, George Romero and his Braddock vampire film Martin).
Following Soavi’s Stagefrightand The Church, this film offers less of the pure insanity that he’d bring to bear in his next film (and sadly, final horror film) Cemetery Man. Yet a restrained Soavi is still more visually inventive than a hundred lesser directors. From images of animal-masked children to the evil Jesus that smokes up and annihilates hippies in the flashback, there’s a continual undercurrent of menace and doom.
Strange symbols just appear. People disappear even after we see them arrive. Or they die in airplane accidents and still appear. Kathryn (Mariangela Giordano, Evelyn from Burial Ground, she of the incestual zombie child relationship) shows up to get smothered by the previously mentioned evil shroud. Worms show up in the water. A possessed Kathryn convinces a trucker to kill her. Rabbit symbolism abounds. Kathryn gets back up off the operating table and attacks Miriam before killing herself again, which a doctor tries to explain as a commonplace thing. Long black tunnels lead to a sinister mortuary. The doctor who couldn’t save Kathryn and Damon, the Jesus-like killer from the opening, are working together. A woman’s face is ripped clean off, Hellraiser-style. Even trusted detective Frank is taken over and wants to kill Kathryn now that he knows her secret. Whew. I hope these short bursts of words give you an idea of just how much happens in this movie. It never really lets up, becoming more and more unreal.
Moebius comes back to life to tell Miriam that every moment of her life has been planned, that they own her, that everything has been for this moment of indescribable joy. The cult gathers as the doctor injects her, sending her to sleep.
Finally, the devil comes to take Miriam. In shadow form, he appears to be human, but what attacks her is a giant bird that pecks at her neck and has his way with her. The cult lowers her into a pit as Moebius raves, screaming that he is her father and that she will give birth to the Antichrist. As she waits in the blue basement water, midwives swim around her, facilitating the birth as the moon slowly goes dark.
A giant amniotic sac with a child inside is lifted as the moon goes completely black.
In a shot straight out of Rosemary’s Baby, Miriam moves through the crowd to see what Moebius refers to as their “revenge against God.” He offers her the chance to raise the child.
Cut to her kneeling, beatific in white, as she stares into the blue waters of the well below. The doctor attempts to be tender to her, but Miriam tosses her down the pit. She makes her way to the rest of the cult and accepts her child, running with it as a motorcyclist chases her and crashes, creating a giant wall of fire.
Moebius screams that they are ger family now. Miriam kneels into the flames of the crashed motorcycle and sacrifices herself to destroy the baby and Moebius.
Fire crews put out the bodies as we see their charred remains wash away — except Miriam is still alive under all of the ash. An eagle circles the sky as Miriam believes that her son saved her.
The Sect is crazy, but it still doesn’t feel as strange as The Church or Stagefright. Yet again, when compared to any other film, it’s odd as hell. It flies by, a mix of imagery and ideas that takes you on a whirling dervish of a ride. It’s hard to find — Shameless put out a UK only DVD this year — but there are plenty of not so legal ways to find a copy. I’d recommend that you do so.
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