Mitchell reveals a lot of misconceptions.

First: Joe Don Baker was once presented as the kind of sex symbol who didn’t just get Linda Evans in bed, he was kind of angry about it.

Second: Mitchell was not intended to be riffed on. And yet here we are, with a movie that most people know from the final episode that Joel was on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Then again, critics hated this when it came out in 1975. Vincent Carnaby said, “Mitchell, starring Joe Don Baker as a hard-nosed Los Angeles detective named Mitchell, has a lot of over-explicit violence, some gratuitous sex stuff and some rough language, yet it looks like a movie that couldn’t wait to get to prime-time television. Perhaps it’s a pilot film for a TV series, or maybe it’s just a movie that’s bad in a style we associate with some of the more mindless small-screen entertainments.

Mitchell spends what seems to be the greater part of the film climbing in and out of automobiles, driving automobiles, chasing other automobiles, parking automobiles, and leaning against the body of automobiles that are temporarily at rest. Once he smashes a hoodlum’s hand in the door of an automobile.

The climax, for a giddy change of pace, features a police helicopter in pursuit of a high-speed cabin cruiser. Automobiles sink when driven onto water.”

He could have been right. After all, the cut that aired on the CBS Late Movie was heavily edited with scenes shot just for TV, eliminating most of the violence, nudity and profanity. It also has the death of John Saxon’s character happen off screen, where we hear about his death on the radio. Keep in mind that he’s presented as Mitchell’s arch enemy.

Mitchell (Baker) is after Saxon’s character, Walter Deaney, but learns from the Chief of Police (Robert Phillips) tells Deaney is wanted for “every federal law violation in the book” and “FBI property.” This doesn’t stop Mitchell, who wants to go after him instead of staking out James Arthur Cummins (Martin Balsam), a crime boss shipping in heroin. To get him off the case, Deaney hired $1,000 a night call girl Greta (Linda Evans) to keep him busy. Instead, Mitchell arrests her for possession and even turns down a bribe. Soon, Deaney and Cummins are working together to kill our slovenly hero.

If you enjoy larger men battling, this has Baker fighting Merlin Olsen. I mean, we’ve already imagined a world where a high priced sex worker wants to sleep with Baker for free. Why not?

Directed by Andrew V. McLaglen (The Wild Geese, The Sea Wolves, Sahara) and written by Ian Kennedy Martin, this also has a great theme song, “Mitchell” by Hoyt Axton.

“My my my my Mitchell
What do your Mama say?
What would she do
if she knew you
were fallin’ round and carryin’ on that way…
Crackin’ some heads, jumpin’ in and out of beds
and hangin’ round the criminal scene…
Do you think you are some kind of a star like the guys on the movie screen…

Well oh my my my Mitchell
What would your captain say?
If he knew you was hangin’ round
Eatin’ with the crooks and shootin’ up the town
Know you been out there, roundin’ up the syndicate
succeedin’ where the others have failed
Oh my my my Mitchell
You shoot ’em just to get ’em in jail
When they take a look in the record book, they’ll find you got a lot of class…

The whole shebang, arrestin’ painted ladies for a little grass
Oh my my my Mitchell!”

Supposedly, Baker was so upset by this being on Mystery Science Theater 3000 that he threatened to fight anyone from the show if he saw them. That didn’t stop them from also doing another of his movies, Final Justice — another movie in which he uses an orange to prove how he is going to destroy someone — on the show.

You can watch this without riffing on Tubi. They also have the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version.

Dino De Laurentiis gave the world a $25 million remake of King Kong. A year later, Runme Shaw looked at that poster and said, “Hold my tiger bone wine.”

If there is one thing Shaw Brothers knows how to do, it’s take a Western trend, give you some cinematic LSD and feed it through a meat grinder until it comes out as something ten times more insane than the original. 

But don’t let the title—or the alternative name, Goliathon—fool you. This isn’t some dry anthropological study. This is a sweaty, neon-drenched, nihilistic masterpiece of Hong Kong exploitation that asks: What if King Kong were a giant, flammable suit actor living in India and had a crush on a blonde girl in a buckskin bikini?

After an earthquake in the Himalayas (which apparently moved the mountains to the middle of the Indian jungle), a giant ape emerges. Enter Lu Tien, an entertainment mogul who is basically what would happen if Carl Denham were an even bigger scumbag. He wants the ape for a world tour or to turn it into a very large rug. Why do these dudes always want to put these giant monkeys on stage? Anyway, he hires Chen Zhengfeng (Danny Lee, long before he was a John Woo regular), a guy with a broken heart because his girlfriend, a diva named Wang Cuihua, slept with his songwriter brother just to get a hit record. Fame is a fickle mistress.

Chen leads the expedition into the jungle, which is a gauntlet of stock footage, rubber snakes and elephants that look annoyed to be in this movie. Maybe they were warned by monkeys, snakes and alligators about the excesses of Italian film crews. Regardless, just as Chen is about to be monkey meat, he’s saved by Ah-wei (Evelyne Kraft, The French Sex Murders), a wild girl who was raised by the ape, whom she calls Utam, after her parents died in a plane crash. She’s like Jane from Tarzan, but her outfit is held together by hope and cinematic glue.

Naturally, Chen and the wild girl fall in love, because nothing says romance like hiding from an enormous primate. He convinces her to bring Utam back to Hong Kong. This goes about as well as you’d expect. Once they hit the city, the movie shifts to pure kaiju carnage. Lu Tien attempts to assault Ah-wei, triggering Utam’s protective instincts. The ape goes on a rampage through Hong Kong that makes the 1933 Kong look like a disciplined Boy Scout. He’s smashing buses, stomping on extras and eventually climbing the Connaught Centre (the one with all the circular windows that looks like a giant cheese grater; it was the largest building in Hong Kong at the time).

The finale is a pyrotechnic nightmare. While the 1976 Kong died with a whimper on the pavement, Utam goes out in a literal blaze of glory, being blasted by tanks and helicopters while the world burns around him. It’s bleak, it’s loud, and it’s glorious. You will believe that a monstrous monkey can get set on fire.

It’s a Shaw Brothers movie, so the production value is weirdly high while the logic is delightfully low. The special effects were handled by Sadamasa Arikawa, who worked on the original Godzilla films, so you get that authentic man-in-a-suit, miniature-city vibe that warms my cynical heart. It makes me even happier to know the lengths that special effects artist Keizô Murase went to. When the original stuntman refused to be set on fire at the end of the movie, Murase personally doused himself with oil, was set ablaze and jumped off a miniature building three different times, sustaining several injuries from the wood, cement and glass used to make the set. Good news: He was given a gold watch from the film’s producer as payment.

Danny Lee emotes like his life depends on it, Evelyne Kraft spends the entire movie looking like she’s in a shampoo commercial* while holding a baby leopard in a way that says that she’s never seen Roar and the Peking Man himself looks like he’s having a permanent bad hair day (the suit was made from actual human hair, donated by 300 Hong Kong citizens). It’s a movie about the cruelty of civilization, the fickleness of show business and the fact that if you’re a giant ape, you should never, ever fall in love with a white blonde or leave your homeland.

According to Kraft, unlike King Kong vs. Godzilla, this had two endings. In the Indian cut, where it is considered bad luck to fake a death, her character lives. But her character dies at the end of all the other versions of the film. I have seen many Indian movies where someone dies, so this feels like IMDbs.

Only in Hong Kong would the heroine die a bloody death at the end of a film.

Beyond Quentin Tarantino, who re-released this movie in 1999, Roger Ebert was also a fan, saying, “Mighty Peking Man is very funny, although a shade off the high mark of Infra-Man, which was made a year earlier, and is my favorite Hong Kong monster film. Both were produced by the legendary Runme Shaw, who, having tasted greatness, obviously hoped to repeat. I find to my astonishment that I gave Infra-Man only two and a half stars when I reviewed it. That was 22 years ago, but a fellow will remember things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that film. I am awarding Mighty Peking Man three stars, for general goofiness and a certain level of insane genius, but I cannot in good conscience rate it higher than Infra-Man. So, in answer to those correspondents who ask if I have ever changed a rating on a movie: Yes, Infra-Man moves up to three stars.”

*Speaking of IMDbs, I learned from that site that The Peking Man wasn’t the only thing turning heads in India. Kraft’s fur bikini proved so distracting that male extras were repeatedly slapped by their wives mid-scene. This battle of the gazes forced the frustrated crew to reshoot the sequence until the cast finally focused on the monster instead of the star.

Kraft claimed that her fur bikini in the film was so skimpy that her top kept popping off while filming, especially during the action scenes. Everything would then stop while she fixed the wardrobe malfunction, but after it kept happening, she just ignored all the male actors and the film crew staring at her breasts. She suspected, but could not prove, that Shaw Brothers had the wardrobe department deliberately make her top that way so that everyone could see her topless and possibly even have footage of it to use in the film.

Once abandoned to the wilds of public domain DVD sets, Messiah of Evil was for a time the gold amongst the dross, a film of incredible power. Hidden amongst old television shows, near-unwatchable transfers of Spanish horror and video store-era throwaways, it held a haunting power. Did I see that? Is this movie real? Can I explain it to anyone who hasn’t seen it?

Today, Messiah of Evil isn’t just a legendary once-lost film returned to power. It’s a work of art that feels like it came from beyond the wall of sleep, the place where the Ancient Ones slumber until time untold to come back and reclaim their rightful and most horrible power.

You can watch Messiah of Evil on several levels. On the most basic, it’s a film about Arietty (the never before or since more lovely Marianna Hill) attempting to find her lost artist father in the cursed town of Point Dume, California.

It’s also a zombie movie of sorts, made in the wake of Night of the Living Dead yet uninfluenced by it, where an entire town slowly becomes something like the living dead. As they bleed from the eyes and lose all sensation, they begin to crave meat from any source, be it an entire grocery store’s meat department, mice or human flesh. Once they give in to their transformation, they light fires on the shore, as their ritual of The Waiting anticipates the Dark Stranger’s return to glory, leading them toward taking over the rest of reality.

Or maybe it’s about something else. Is it about the final days of the class struggle that started in the 60s? The zombies nearly all wear suits while their targets, like collector of legends Thom (Michael Greer, who would go on to provide the voice for Bette Davis after she quit the film Wicked Stepmother) and his two lovers, Toni (Joy Bang, who worked with talents like Roger Vadim, Norman Mailer and Woody Allen before Messiah) and Laura (The Price is Right model Anitra Ford), are free love visions of style and sophistication. Yet the Dark Stranger cuts through class, even turning cop upon cop near the climax.

Parts of the film were never fully realized, but that doesn’t matter. Some critics complain that major plot points and the lead characters’ motivations are never fully explained. Even the most normal people in this film act like the strangest characters in others. At no point does it feel like we’re watching a movie set in our reality.

I don’t want that.

This is what I want. A transmission from another place where our surrealism is their everyday.

Messiah of Evil was created in an environment that will never exist again — the New Hollywood that starts with traditional studios panicking as their blockbusters and musicals would stall at the box office, while films like Easy Rider succeeded. Suddenly, deeply personal films would be made within the studio or even exploitation systems. Indeed, the previously mentioned Night of the Living Dead is packed with politics and social commentary, things only hinted at in past horror and science fiction films. This trend would die with Jaws and Star Wars. Yet at this point, as this film’s commentary track by Kim Newman and Stephen Thrower reminds us, even the creators of the blockbusters that changed entertainment forever, all the way back then, all wanted to be artists. And in a moment of true irony, the creators of this film — the husband-and-wife team of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz — would go on to direct Howard the Duck and write American Graffiti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for Goerge Lucas.

This is a movie where the heroine finds herself in the throes of undead transformation, throwing up mouthfuls of insects while the shade of her father begs her to not tell the world what she knows before he attacks her. After murdering everyone else in their path, the dead things of Point Dume don’t kill her. No, they resign her to an even more horrible fate: she must spread the legend further so that once the Dark Stranger arrives, more of reality is receptive to his grasp. She ends the film in a mental institution, knowing that one day soon, the end of everything we hold dear will arrive.

I love that this movie once appeared in DVD bundles easily available in K-Marts and WalMarts, places where normal people would find this asynchronous transmission from another place and time and wonder what the hell they were watching. Much like the infection of Point Dume or Arietty spreading the infection into other towns, it found the right people. It always discovers the best way to transmit its message to those most willing to spread its legend. It survives, no matter what, despite not being finished, despite age, despite being lost for so long.

How wonderful it is to have what was once occult brought into the light and yet it loses nothing of its infernal power. In fact, it retains its power now, all the furtive watches and evangelists that loved this movie and spread that message.

BONUS: Listen to the commentary track that I did with Bill Van Ryn from Drive-In Asylum here:

You have to admire the balls of the makers of this movie. Actually, you can probably see them from space. They bought footage of Sir Christopher Lee from another movie and used it as the beginning and end of this movie, then said the film stars the venerable thespian. Learning that a lawsuit would be long and expensive, he just had to fume. I wonder if he was as angry as when he walked out of A Bay of Blood?

Lee’s speech has nothing at all to do with the rest of the movie. Let’s all admire his plaid slacks, however.

Anyway, the real meat of the movie involves the death of a dog named Poopers, four college students killing one of their professors and lots and lots of paintings, then Morak, an evil force, comes out of the possibly dead professor.

You’ll be forgiven if this movie seems like it makes no sense because it doesn’t. And that’s probably why I liked it: I watched it five drinks into a bender, and it was perfect for that moment when alcohol goes from tasting wonderful to tasting like way too much.

This was probably made in 1975, but who cares? How many movies do you know where dead teachers command cacti from beyond the grave to kill their students? I can think of one, and I’m writing about it right now.

Seriously, Christopher Lee spent as much time looking at contracts as all my favorite horror stars. Work is work, but I have no idea how he thought reading a script about a shaman convention inside a wood-paneled room was going to work out all that well.

Evan Lee made one movie. This was it. If he made any more, the world would have exploded.

In case you need to know just how odd and weird and whatever other descriptors you need for it, Ed Wood himself shows up in a cameo. Now that’s a guy who knew how to throw a non-sequitur speech directly into a movie. Pull the string!