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 Grafitti 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. It’s just easier to access it thanks to the Radiance Films blu ray.

Featuring a 2023 restoration from a 4K scan of the best-surviving elements of the film from the Academy Film Archive, their blu ray release is something I never thought would happen. It creates new moments and feelings in me; I always believed that Arietty felt trapped in a comic strip world in her father’s house, but thanks to this new restoration, it appears that his paintings are real, that the mirrors and colors and brushstrokes are his way of showing how the outside city has become sick and wrong. They are as trapped in this reality as any other. The colors on her face as she drives through the night, the hum of the marquee in the center of town, the faces that appear in Ralph’s supermarket hungry for something, anything — all more vital. All more fresh. All more dead.

This release also includes an archival interview with co-writer-director Willard Huyck by Mike White from the Projection Booth Podcast; a documentary titled What the Blood Moon Brings: Messiah of Evil, A New American Nightmare that is co-directed by Dima Ballin and Kat Ellinger and has appearances by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Maitland McDonagh, Guy Adams, Mikel Koven and David Huckvale; and a visual essay by Ellinger on American Gothic and female hysteria.

There’s also a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow, as well as a book with contributions by Bill Ackerman, Joseph Dwyer, Amanda Reyes, Andy Marshall-Roberts and Larissa Glasser. 

The extras have added even more to my love of this film, even if Newman and Thrower can’t tell the difference between Joy Bang and Anitra Ford. Not just once. Multiple times. I don’t expect two British film experts to know what Ralph’s supermarket is, but my love for both Bang and Ford — and of course Hill — is beyond human measurement. I yelled at my television!

If you love movies, you should have already bought this.

You can order it from MVD.

You can also listen to the commentary track that I did with Bill Van Ryn from Drive-In Asylum here:

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Roommates aired on USA Up All Night on June 18 and December 11, 1993 and February 24, 1995.

Carla (Marki Bey, Sugar Hill herself!), Heather (Pat Woodell, The Big Doll House) Beth (Roberta Collins, Eaten Alive, Unholy Rollers), Brea (Laurie Rose AKA Misty Dawn, the wife of John Holmes) and Paula (Christina Hart, The Stewardesses) take a summer vacation together on Lake Arrowhead. This would seem to be a very Corman nurse movie from the surface, but the tagline — “Which will die in the class of ’73?” — points to a very frightening story.

Is it too soon to talk about 1972?

Of course, all the men in this movie are horrible, like Martin (Ken Scott), the owner of the motel who sleeps with Heather and was the man who took her virginity when she should have been doing her driver’s test. And then there’s the death of Alice (Connie Strickland), stabbed a hundred times and left in the woods so close to where the girls sleep.

Whodunnit? Socks the biker (John Durren, who wrote the movie)? His girlfriend (Paula Shaw, The Centerfold Girls, Pamela Vorhees in Freddy vs. Jason)? Creepy Harold (Greg Mabrey)? Don the handyman (Kipp Whitman)? Just about any guy in this movie? And why would Heather throw a big party when, you know, there’s been a murder?

I’m making this sound more like it has an actual story and less than a vehicle for female nudity, as each of the leads gets their clothes off as do the guest stars, which include Connie Strickland, Uschi Digard, Lindsay Bloom (H.O.T.S.), and Juanita Brown. When your movie starts with a medical school orgy, you know how it will go.

Arthur Marks also directed Detroit 9000, Bonnie’s Kids, Linda Lovelace for President, the way better than any of those movies J.D.’s Revenge, Friday Foster and uncredited work on Solar Crisis. Durren also came up with the idea for the Mickey Rooney movie The Manipulator and wrote Devil Times Five.

I like the ramshackle narrative of this movie, but this one really shows you just how good Corman’s crew was at making their girls movies.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Invasion of the Bee Girls aired on USA Up All Night on June 8 and September 1, 1990 and March 8 and September 21, 1991.

This was the first movie that Nicholas Meyer ever wrote. Yes, the same guy who wrote The Day After, Time After Time and the two good Star Trek films (two and four, if you’re playing at home) started right here. One day when he left to visit his parents, the script was altered and young Mr. Meyer wanted to take his name off of the project, but was convinced by his manager that he needed a credit.

Neil Agar (William Smith, Grave of the Vampire) is a special agent for the State Department sent to investigate the numerous deaths at government-sponsored Brandt Research.

It turns out that the scientists there are more obsessed with sex than their research to the point that some of them are literally getting balled to death. By the way, I’m on a quest to get the word balling and ball used in the vernacular again. Please help me.

The truth is the women of the research lab have all become Bee Girls through self-induced mutation. Now they have eyes that allow them to see like insects and the instincts of using and destroying men, several of whom totally welcome the end.

The main reason to watch this is Anitra Ford as Dr. Susan Harris. You may remember her from The Big Bird Cage and being a model on The Price Is Right. She’s in one of my favorite movies, 1972’s Messiah of Evil. If you haven’t seen that, you should probably just stop reading this right now and get on that.

Victoria Vetri plays the heroine, Julie Zorn. Using the name Angela Dorian, she was the Playboy Playmate of the Month for September 1967 and 1968’s Playmate of the Year. When Apollo 12 went to the moon, a photo of her and Playmates Leslie Bianchini, Reagan Wilson and Cynthia Myers was there, inserted into the activity astronaut cuff checklists.

She also appears in Rosemary’s Baby and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. In 2010, nearly a quarter-century into her marriage to Bruce Rathgeb, Vetri was charged with attempted murder after allegedly shooting her husband at close range after an argument. She received nine years in prison on a charge that was finally reduced to attempted voluntary manslaughter. Her husband claimed that she had been saying, “No more Charlie, no more Charlie,” as she’d been convinced that Charles Manson wanted her dead ever since her friend Sharon Tate was killed. In fact, the gun that she used was given to her by Roman Polanski, who her husband claimed that she often slept with along with Tate. Vetri is in a halfway house now and working on making her way back to society.

This movie is also known as Graveyard Tramps, which has nothing to do with what it’s really about. You should watch it anyway.

Here’s a drink recipe.

Invasion of the Bee’s Knees

• 2 oz. gin
• .75 oz. lemon juice
• .75 oz. honey syrup
• 1 oz. egg white
• Dash of honey

1. Place all ingredients in a shaker, then shake vigorously.
2. Pour into a glass and enjoy.

I mean, if you made a movie just for me, this would be it.

This had to be sent to the Italian censorship board twice, as they said that the film “consists of a rambling series of sadistic sequences, meant to urge, through extreme cruelty mixed with degenerate eroticism, the lowest sexual instincts.”

Also called Riti, magie nere e segrete orge nel Trecento…(Rites, Black Magic and Secret Orgies in the Fourteenth Century…) and The Reincarnation of Isabel, this was written and directed by Renato Polselli, who also made Delirio Caldo, The Vampire and the Ballerina and Revelations of a Psychiatrist on the World of Sexual Perversion.

Hundreds of years ago, Isabella (Rita Calderoni, Nude for Satan) was tortured and burned for being a witch as her lover swore revenge. Then we meet Jack Nelson (Mickey Hargitay, making some wild movies as always) and his stepdaughter Laureen (also Calderoni) who are celebrating her engagement in a castle without knowing that the cellar is host to the black magic rites of the title. And if they get seven sets of eyes and the blood of virgins, they can bring back Isabella.

Any time this movie feels like it’s getting boring or starting to make sense, it cuts to either sex scenes or murder or Satanic rituals and you know, more movies could learn from what it was all about. I can only imagine the kind of parties that Polselli used to host.

There are also vampires, because this movie is also known as The Ghastly Orgies of Count Dracula.

You know, I never dated many girls who wore makeup before my wife. But there was one that was taking her time putting on makeup and she was putting on false eyelashes and I was trying to say that she didn’t need all that makeup and lashes and she said, “I’m doing it for me. And you. So let me get hot for you.” I wish I had seen this movie before I dated her, because man, the fake eyelashes in this are doing something to me.

Revelations of a Psychiatrist on the World of Sexual Perversion is a mondo film that draws from real newspaper headlines to show the sexual sick truth, as I’m certain an American trailer would say if this movie had ever emerged from its native Italy. Directed and written by Renato Polselli, it has a psychiatrist named Dr. Froodman explaining the deviancy that he has seen to a group of his students.

If this was shocking in 1973, when it first came out, it would be even more shocking in 1979. In fact, some of the adult scenes would still feel taboo in 2023, as two men touching one another, even with a female third present, doesn’t often appear in mainstream adult.

There are all manner of perversions here — and if you get what they are just by the name like me, well, you have some issues — including zooerastia, nymphomania, necrophilia, fetishes and gerontophilia. Even one of the students gets involved, as she explains why she fell for an older adult man while just a child; his abuse of her is just one reason why this happened. And the doctor is not above sharing the story of his servant who lost his virginity at the late age of 44 to someone of the third sex, as they say in these mondo films.

A lot of the inserts were either staged with a totally different cast or taken directly from American loops. You have to love the Italian exploitation industry, as they have no fear when it comes to being outright thieves. Polselli used his Ralph Brown name for this; the cast has a few notable people in it, including Isarco Ravaioli as the professor (he’s also in The Throne of Fire, Polselli’s Mania and Oscenità, Satanik, Danger: Diabolik and a few Sartana and Django Clones); Franca Gonella (Diabolicamente… Letizia and Luigi Rosso’s Beauty and the Beast); Bruna Beani (the priestess in The Eerie Midnight Horror Show, Byleth: The Demon of Incest) and Melissa Chimenti, who was Papaya in Joe D’Amato’s Papaya: Love Goddess of the Cannibals. As most of those movies are filled with either sex, violence or sex and violence, you should know what you’re getting into here.

At once a movie that has a girl explain her sexual desire for dogs and then shag a stuffed animal while also being a film that closes with the line “We are all spent beings desperately trying to walk towards infinity,” this barrage of rapid cuts and filth is pretty much Polselli from here on out.