If all Juan López Moctezuma directed was Alucarda, he’d still be celebrated. Throw in the fact that he was behind the camera for El Topo and also created this little piece of strangeness and you can see that he’s someone to be celebrated.

A journalist has traveled to Dr. Maillard’s (Claudio Brook, Alucarda, The Devil’s Rain!) remote mental institution to write a story about the progressive treatment the doctor offers: patients are free to roam and fully live out their fantasies. However, when he gets there, the reporter learns from the doctor’s daughter Eugenie that he hasn’t met the real doctor, just one of the inmates that is quite literally running the asylum and randomly quoting Aleister Crowley. Even better — Susana Kamini, Justine from Alucarda, shows up as a cult priestess!

Imagine if Hammer or Amicus made a movie in Mexico, with all of the dialogue in English, and fed massive amounts of drugs to everyone involved. That’s pretty much how I imagine that this film was made. It’s also an Edgar Allan Poe story (The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether), but really, it’s also a costume drama with more powdered wigs than a British courthouse. And man, has there ever been so sensationalistic a title?

Will you like it? Not if you’re expecting a horror movie. Again, the Chilling Classics set confounds expectations, seeming like it will only feature the worst schlock and somehow embracing Mexican art cinema. I can only imagine that there’s a basement in the Mill Creek offices where the maniac that chose the films for this set signed off on it with a feather pen and a giant flourish, exclaiming, “I hope this makes someone’s brain melt!”

Beyond watching this on the Chilling Classics box set, you can also find it on Amazon Prime. If you want a much better looking copy of this film, Mondo Macabro released it as The Mansion of Madness, complete with a brand new digital transfer and Guillermo dl Toro discussing the director.

Between great design, reviews of junk food and lots of great info on the artists behind horror movie posters, there’s a lot to love about the site Camera Viscera. Here’s one more: Doc, the creator of the site, has sent this article on Messiah of Evil!

The best word to describe Messiah of Evil (really, the only word to describe the film) is surreal. With its vampire-zombie hybrid antagonists and rundown seaside setting (not to mention its pseudo-satanic undertones) it’s a movie less concerned with weaving a cohesive narrative than it is stringing together as many odd characters and bold set pieces as it can in its belabored 90-minute runtime. But what Messiah lacks in grace (and budget, and continuity, and comprehension, etc.) it makes up for in genuine curiosity.

When the film opens, a young woman named Arletty (Marianna Hill, who also acts as narrator) is driving to Point Dume, a sleepy seaside town along the California coast, in search of her artist father from whom she hasn’t heard in some time. When she arrives at his beach house, she finds no sign of him, but she does find a diary he left, seemingly for her to read. The journal entries are ominous and cryptic, warning her of not only the other-worldly dangers that seem to inhabit the town, but also unsettling changes that are happening to her father.

Through no real explanation, she eventually hooks up with a trio of fellow out-of-towners: Thom, Toni, and Laura (Michael Greer, Joy Bang, Anitra Ford). Thom seems to be on a similar hunt of his own, searching for answers surrounding the type of portents Arletty’s father’s diary warned about. Thom’s motivations are never clearly explained, but that’s par for the course with Messiah.

One of the signs Arletty’s father warned of is a blood moon, which eventually appears in the sky one night, setting off the chain of events described in his diary. Locals wander aimlessly on the beach, their heads transfixed skyward. Hordes of blood-thirsty flesh-eaters stalk the streets at night. People bleed from their eyes. Our titular Man in Black (who we come to learn was a member of the fated Donner Party) shows up to greet his disciples. No one seems to know what the hell is going on, including the viewer.

After a few inspired but poorly executed set pieces (the two best ones involving a supermarket and a movie theater), the film crescendos into a battle of survival for Thom and Arletty at her father’s bungalow. Despite its minuscule budget, the film manages to deliver some surprising action, including a few falls-through-a-skylight and even an extended full body burn. Alas, even these dazzling displays including the supermarket and movie theater scenes aren’t enough to make the film feel anything less than a slog. The highlights are too few and far between, sandwiched amid a shuffle of go-nowhere scenes and mostly sluggish performances.

Messiah was released theatrically in 1973, under no less than four different titles, and getting it to the big screen was no easy task. According to Ford, “…shot in 1971, this movie was originally titled The Second Coming. Towards the end of the filming, investors pulled their money out, and the film was never finished. A Frenchman bought the unedited footage, edited it and released the movie under the title of Messiah of Evil.” And indeed one of Messiah‘s greatest weaknesses is its editing. Scenes abruptly end, dialogue isn’t synced properly, jump cuts abound. It’s all very slapdash, and it shows.

The film was written and directed by husband and wife team, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, and to say they have had an interesting career in Hollywood would be an understatement. The same year Messiah was released, the duo who happened to be friends with George Lucas, serendipitously enough ended up being asked to write American Graffiti and later Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, as well as being tasked with writing and directing the unanimously derided bomb, Howard the Duck. It’s about as strange a journey as Messiah of Evil itself.

Messiah is arthouse exploitation. Equal doses of trippy visuals (for the pompous types) and goopy low-budget viscera (for the rowdy types). Though not as refined as its contemporaries, it still shares shelf space with the likes of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, Burnt Offerings, The Witch Who Came from the Sea, and others. It’s a niche but important sub-genre, one whose entries flow with the languid, dreamlike pace that only a movie from this era could. Gauzy visuals and strange happenings like your brain after a long night of drinking.

While I’d recommend a few other titles before this one, Messiah of Evil is worth a watch if you’re an exploitation completist looking for a break from reality.

What happens when a young man is released from an insane asylum and returns home? Well, he goes for revenge on his aunt and her three daughters, the ones who stole his insurance when they claimed he had gone crazy.

This is another part of the Avco Embassy’s Nightmare Theater package syndicated for television in 1975. The others are Marta, Death Smiles on a Murderer, Maniac Mansion, Night of the Sorcerers, Fury of the Wolfman, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Witches Mountain, Mummy’s Revenge and The Witch).

Bell from Hell isn’t an easy watch. It’s dreamy at times, brutally realistic at others, particularly the slaughterhouse scene. Juan wants revenge against Marta (Viveca Lindfors, Creepshow) and her three daughters (as well as anyone connected with them), but there are times when he could easily kill them and he lets them escape. A good chunk of this movie feels thrown together. But there’s a reason.

Director Claudio Guerín fell — or jumped — from the tower housing the title bell on the last day of shooting and was killed. The film was completed by Juan Antonio Bardem. One assumes that Bardem did the best job he could to combine all the many parts that Guerín into some whole. Throw in the fact that this movie is translated from Spanish to English and you get a swirling dervish of confusion.

As Matthew watches his father work on a tractor, he decides to turn it on and kill him with it, all at the cost of his own left hand. Yes, we’re not even at the credits yet and Scream Bloody Murder — the first motion picture to be called gore-nography! — is already insane.

Matthew grows up in a psychiatric hospital with a hook for a hand, returning home at the age of eighteen to live with his mother and her new husband, Mack Parsons. In addition to killing his father, Matthew might hate sex but wants to fuck his mother. He does the logical thing here and kills Parsons with an axe and shoves his mother to the ground and kills her when her head hits a rock. We’re about ten minutes into this movie, mind you.

Our hero takes a ride with a young couple, but soon, he’s seeing them as his mother and Parsons, screaming, “Don’t touch her!” and beating the man to death with a rock and drowning the woman. This movie feels less like a movie and more I am watching maniacs actually film their insane activities. And then the voices of his mom and new dad chase him everywhere!

Finally, Matthew makes it to town where he meets Vera, a painter and prostitute. He falls in love with her to the kind of degree that I would when it came to mean girls who smoked gloves and had asymmetrical haircuts in the early 1990’s. Except instead of making them mixtapes and doing their homework, Matthew is slicing the throat of one of her johns and violently taking over a mansion. Yes, he uses a pillow to kill the owner, a cleaver to kill the maid and even cuts off a dog’s head! Matthew!

Matthew then brings Vera to his new home, but she refuses to live there, so he takes her prisoner. Even when he gives her the life of her dreams and the chance to be an artist, she doesn’t want to stay.

Soon, a doctor comes to visit (Angus Scrimm!) but Matthew kills him. Vera is stuck inside with a killer, but she realizes that he’s disgusted by sex. She convinces him to let her take a bath and then tries to make him have sex with her. He starts to freak out and turns his head. She stabs him, but he survives and soon chases her down before cutting her throat with his hook.

With his love now dead, Matthew goes completely off — everything before was just a test, obviously — and runs through town, followed by the voices and phantom states of his victims as they lure him to his fate. He’s also followed by some swinging horns, baby! Everything descends into psychedelics, aided and abetted by the kind of horrible transfer that you know and love from your friends at Mill Creek. I don’t care! I don’t need a perfect blu-ray or 4K transfer to love the end of this movie! Dig that dolly roll back from the altar! Now that’s a shot!

Writer/director Marc B. Ray also wrote Stepfather 3, as well as an episode of Kids Incorporated, featuring Martika, Fergie and Jeff “Chunk from The Goonies” Cohen and Mario Lopez, and the 1970’s New Mickey Mouse Club, with Lisa Whelchel of TV’s Facts of Life. And co-writer Larry Alexander worked on plenty of 70’s TV, like Lucan and The Super Mario Super Show. None of this kid fare will prepare you for this movie.

This is one bizarre, dark and downright strange movie. It’s nearly an art film, filled with meanness toward the world and nearly everyone in it is murdered — horribly — for no reason at all. Actually, it’s too poorly shot to be an art film, but I wonder how audiences reacted to this upon watching it at the drive-in. There’s no real escape valve or comedy relief. It’s just unrepentant nihilism. In fact, it gets so dark that one wonders if it goes so far that it becomes comedic.

Also known as Claw of Terror, Captive Female and Matthew, this is yet another part of the Chilling Classics box set, which is equally packed with bad quality and great surprises.

You can watch the whole thing here:

In Greece, a stewardess is murdered by a masked maniac, with the authorities feeling like it can only be one of two people: a drunken American playboy (George Hamilton) and a murderous gangster (Cameron Mitchell). Yes, the Mill Creek Chilling Classics set really knows how to give you quite the mix of films!

According to screenwriter Christopher Wicking, this film was only made because George Hamilton was willing to do it. He was about to marry Alana Stewart (she’s in the film in a small role) and he figured it was the chance to have a great honeymoon with all expenses paid, as well as an acting salary.

As for the film that emerged, well…it tries to be a giallo yet has none of the trademark verve and energy of that genre. It does have Luciana Paluzzi from The Green Slime as Harrison’s incestuous sister. So it has that going for it.

Man, I usually love Gordon Hessler’s films, like Scream, Pretty Peggy and Sho Kosugi’s Pray for Death. But this film plods like no other film has plodded before. It’s hour and thirty-nine minute running time may as well be three years and nine months.

I guess I can honestly say that this is both the best and worst George Hamilton vanity project that I’ve ever seen.