Messiah of Evil
It was a town once called New Bethlehem but now renamed Point Dune, an enclosed community which doesn’t welcome outsiders or make any concessions for tourists; the artist Joseph Lang having moved there some time ago, communications with his daughter Arletty became infrequent then stopped altogether, and now in defiance of his last letter urging her not to try to find him she has come to the California coast to search for him.
What she finds is locals who are disinterested and disinclined to help, a town where the streets are empty after dark, and a trio of other strangers in town, Thom and his companions Laura and Toni, he also seeking Joseph for reasons unspecified and then a place to stay when they are thrown out of their motel following an incident which leaves a local drunk dead, torn apart by dogs, the uninvited trio moving in with Arletty, an arrangement which she is not comfortable with but comes to accept.
An understated oddity of independent horror cinema, Messiah of Evil was released in late 1974, directed by Willard Huyck from a script co-written with his wife Gloria Katz, the same team who would later write Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Howard the Duck, the latter also directed by Huyck, starring The Baby’s Marianna Hill as Arletty, House II’s Royal Dano as the absent Joseph and Michael Greer as the boorish braggart Thom, with Anitra Ford and Joy Bang as Laura and Toni.
Greer better remembered as a nightclub and drag performer who re-wrote his parts in The Gay Deceivers and Fortune and Men’s Eyes to make them more authentic, he is an awkward fit in a rare straight role as the “collector of old legends” who wishes to learn more about the history of the town which was visited a century before by a survivor of the notorious Donner Party who came to spread his new religion, the Messiah of Evil of the title, though the film is also variously known as Dead People, Night of the Damned, Return of the Living Dead and Revenge of the Screaming Dead.
Surreal and dreamlike, with an opening scene of a terrified man (Streets of Fire director Walter Hill) running from an unseen threat before being beckoned to supposed safety by a girl with a concealed razor, the film is a time capsule of the attitudes and architecture of the late sixties and early seventies, albeit with radical eccentricities, Thom’s presumption that Arletty will join his harem, the blind art dealer, the supermarket where the shoppers gather at the butcher’s counter to eat raw meat, and tellingly for an independent production the faces of the massed extras are distinctly non-Hollywood, a twist on the smalltown plastic perfection of The Stepford Wives.
The journal of mental disintegration a warning tool frequently employed by H P Lovecraft and Room 237 a location of interest to theorists of The Shining, the cast is something of a Star Trek reunion with Court Martial’s Elisha Cook, Jr and Wolf in the Fold’s Charles Dierkop as Charlie and a gas station attendant, both swiftly eliminated, Hill herself best known as Dagger of the Mind’s Doctor Helen Noel, and while the film fails to leverage its disconcerting emptiness it does become more unsettling as it progresses as the visitors become more corrupted, changing their behaviour until they are indistinguishable from the hungry locals.
Messiah of Evil is available on Shudder now
