This starts like a women in prison Phillipines-made Roger Corman movie but before you’re ready, the kidnapped ladies all end up in a camp run by Baru (John Considine), who has a crazy necklace and cape. I think it’s his fashion that made him ruler and part of their immortal cult that drinks the blood of young women to stay alive. Dude dresses like Dr. Strange. But what happens when one of the new girls, Laura (Jennifer Billingsley, Lou from White Lightning), looks like the goddess they worship? Can she save the other girls — Claire (Judith McConnell), Anne (Fredricka Meyers) and Bonnie (Chiqui Da Rosa)?
Here are some facts about this movie that I’m too high to break down in prose and decided to just do bullet points:
- John Considine was also Dr. Death, Seeker of Souls. I’m gonna start a critical reappraisal of his work, since he’s the only villain in a horror movie I have seen who may also show up straight-up raw-dogging it in my parents’ hidden copy of Dr. Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex. PS: When I did shortly — it can’t be long, thanks to my sedentary life of just watching movies all day and night — that book is in the back closet, beyond my mom’s room, in the weird room where the rich family that lived there in the 1950s kept their secret mentally handicapped son. Top shelf, navigate to the rear of that shelf, and it’s behind a false wall. I am serious; my dad used to love hiding stuff, and I have no idea how I found both that book and More Joy of Sex. I wish I had never found them, and if you know what’s good for you, don’t bother my mom or the ghost child of the forgotten aforementioned boy who lives with her, floating in that room.
- This movie has so many magic leaves, leaves that can heal cuts and, when combined with blood, can make you live forever. As the fox said to the hound, “Forever is a really long time.” That movie came out when I was 9, and in 1981, all I wanted to do was be an edge lord pre-pubescent and get to go see slashers. Instead, my parents took us to The Fox and the Hound, and I cried big, wet, burning, sloppy breakup tears at the end. Again, perhaps my parents were using emotional damage to teach me a lesson I will never learn.
- The people in this movie have an amazing religion that is based on wearing pastels despite being vampires, and they have the cool kids who are young forever and the uncool caste who live in dungeons, get old and are also all lepers. But the bad guys all worship the head of a dead god who still speaks to them, and they’re led by, again, a dude in an Easter egg blue cape and cowl.
- This is a PG-rated movie — 1970s PG — that starts in a live nudes bar.
- It’s directed by Chief Sharkey from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
- Laura is actually nice, and that’s refreshing because more people should be nice. She’s also a goddess of these people and yet is still that kind. That said, blonde white women being goddesses of the natives is super racist and yet we keep watching movies where that happens — and by we, I mean I.
- It’s too twisted for the kids but not filthy enough for the raincoaters. What is a girl to do?
- Is this a Star Trek episode without Star Trek?
- Speaking of my parents, by the time he was my age, he’d already had two kids in college, was only a few years away from retirement, had his house paid off and had taught so many students that he’d changed lives. As for me, I’ve seen more than 170 Jess Franco movies and am currently watching a Bollywood musical where people fight wizards and walk on coals.
- I remember once asking my dad if I’d ever stop being afraid of death. He said, “Some day, you’ll be so tired of life and work, you won’t see it as a bad thing.” My dad was full of advice like this that was actually an example of his sense of humor, like when he told me the entire world was a play for a god we’d never meet. That’s hilarious to me now; it was pants-shitting terrifying when I was ten. Man, I loved my dad.
You can watch this on Tubi.
