MESSIAH OF EVIL (1973)

Arletty (Marianna Hill) is telling her story in flashback in an institution. She went to the beach town of Point Dune to see her father, Joseph Lang, an artist, who has been sending her strange disjointed letters about feeling threatened. The town, an artist's colony, is not very welcoming to Arletty; people know who he is but claim to know nothing about him. A blind art dealer, who dismisses his work, tells her that three other people came around looking for him for an interview. She meets up with them (well-dressed Thom and hippie girls Toni and Laura—they seem to function like a threesome, but that’s never quite clarified) and soon they join Arletty in her dad's house, the walls of which are painted in huge stark murals of creepy-looking people. A homeless man (Elisha Cook Jr.) tells them of a coming "blood moon" which will affect townspeople in strange ways, and suggests that her father may already be dead. Moments later, the man is killed in an alleyway. Slowly, more information emerges, something about the expected return of a Dark Stranger who, a hundred years ago, showed up in town. He was a survivor of the Donner Party and established a new religion that turned people into what can best be described as cannibal vampire zombies. Now, the townsfolk believe that the Stranger will return to spread their religion across the land. And they need a sacrifice…

This 1973 B-horror flick has an interesting pedigree: it was written and directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz who also, around the same time, wrote American Graffiti. Those who see this as a zombie movie are reminded of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead—and the film was re-titled, for a time, Return of the Living Dead until a lawsuit stopped that. Interestingly, this has a few scenes that seem to anticipate Romero's later movie, Dawn of the Dead, including a scene in a near-empty grocery store where a handful of the creatures are gnawing on raw meat. Perhaps the best-known sequence is one reminiscent of Hitchcock's The Birds in which a young woman sits down in a near-empty movie theater and slowly the auditorium fills up with zombies behind her. Very effective. I guess technically the townspeople are zombies, since they do attack and eat (at least partially) other people, but I was more struck by its tonal and occasional visual resemblance to Carnival of Souls. There are some very well done moments; the nighttime street scenes are all spooky, and the artwork in Joseph's house gives the place a surreal feel.

Unfortunately, the script could have used another draft. The whys and wherefores of the Dark Stranger and his cult are not examined in any detail, and I wasn't sure if the people of Point Dune were always cannibal zombies or only when there was a blood moon. Arletty's dad does eventually show up (a nice cameo performance from veteran character actor Royal Dano) but to no particular purpose except to provide a scene of fiery destruction. The acting is mostly B-level: Michael Greer, Anitra Ford and Joy Bang as the threesome (pictured at right) all feel a bit amateurish, though they weren't amateurs, so perhaps it was a directing problem. I have read that the production ran out of money and post-production was taken out of the hands of Huyck and Katz which may account for some of the problems. The print I saw was a slightly squeezed full screen version of a widescreen movie, and not in the best shape, though a restored version is now available on Blu-ray. Despite some flaws, I would recommend this to fans of 70s horror. [YouTube]