messiah of evil

Dismembering the Twin Cities Alamo

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We do not have an Alamo Drafthouse in New Orleans and, to be honest, I’m totally okay with that.  I appreciate the chain’s consistent enthusiasm for programming retro genre schlock, but there’s just something off-putting about watching any movie while underplayed teenagers scurry like peasants in the dark, delivering little treats & trinkets to the royal customers on our pleather thrones.  Canal Place’s worst era was the brief period when it attempted to mimic the Alamo dine-in experience, which I’m saying as someone who worked in the theater’s kitchen during those long, dark years.  I mean, why pay for a $20 salad when you can simply wait an hour and then literally walk to several of the greatest restaurants in the world?  It was a baffling novelty in our local context.  I was recently invited to an Alamo Drafthouse while vacationing in the Twin Cities, though, and I feel like I got introduced to the chain’s whole deal in the one context where it does make sense.  For one thing, the Twin Cities Alamo is not located in the Twin Cities at all, but rather way out in the strip mall suburbs where there’s nothing better to do or eat within walking distance. In fact, there’s hardly anything within walking distance at all.  “Public transportation” instructions on Google led me to take a train ride from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul, then a bus ride from St Paul to the side of a featureless suburban highway, and then a cheap Uber ride for the final stretch to the theater.  That’s hardly equivalent to wedging a combo restaurant-cinema onto the busiest corner of the French Quarter.  Also, I traveled there specifically to attend an all-day horror movie marathon, where mid-film snack & drink deliveries were necessary for my hourly survival.  That overpriced pizza saved my life.

The annual “Dismember the Alamo” event is a Halloween Season tradition where the theater chain programs four-to-five “surprise” horror films, typically selected from the AGFA library.  The program varies theater to theater, so I can only report on what screened this year at the Twin Cities location (which is, again, not located in either of the Twin Cities).  It opened with two movies I’ve already reviewed for this site in Octobers past: Messiah of Evil (which I love) and The Changeling (which I tolerate) – two artistically minded, leisurely paced horrors of relative respectability.  The plan was then to screen two more slower paced, fussily styled horrors Swampflix has already covered in Ringu and Blood & Black Lace, but technical difficulties intervened.  While the staff scrambled to get the second half of the program running, I was happy to have time to chat with a long-distance friend in a venue notorious for not tolerating mid-film chatter of any kind.  Then, when the show got back on the rails, they had thrown out the planned program to instead play two oddball 80s novelties I had personally never seen.  The pacing picked up, the movies got weirder, and the room took on more of a horror nerd party vibe than the horror nerd sleepover feel of the opening half.  I got treated to the full surprise lineup experience of the Dismember the Alamo ritual, to the point where even the marathon’s programmers were surprised by the titles they ended up playing when the DCPs for Ringu & Black Lace refused to cooperate.  The Great Pumpkin smiled warmly upon me that day, which I very much needed after traveling alone in the Minnesota cold.

The third film in this year’s Dismember the Twin Cities Alamo lineup was the 1988 haunted house horror Night of the Demons.  It was perfect Halloween Season programming, regardless of its function as a much-needed energy boost within the marathon.  In the film, the absolute worst dipshit teens to ever disgrace the screen spend Halloween night getting torn to shreds by demons whenever they get too horny to live.  In the audience, the awed seriousness that met The Changeling gave way to chortles & cheers, especially as the Reaganite jocks onscreen received their demonic comeuppance from the monstrously transformed goths they bully in the first act.  That vocal response continued into the opening credits of 1981’s The Burning, which is credited as the brainchild of a young Harvey Weinstein.  Weinstein’s name lingered in the air as the film’s horndog teen boy protagonists pressured their coed summer camp cohorts for sex in nearly every scene, only to be violently interrupted by a disfigured slasher villain named Cropsy.  The Burning proved to be a fascinating bridge between the urban, gloved-killer grime of Italo proto-slashers and the sickly summer camp hedonism of the standard American brand.  I imagine it would’ve inspired multiple bodycount slasher sequels if it were simply retitled Cropsy instead of the much more generic The Burning, since the horrifically disfigured villain on a revenge mission has an interesting enough look & signature weapon (gigantic gardening shears) to justify his own long-running franchise.  He at least deserves it as much as Jason Voorhees, since The Burning is a major improvement on a template established by early entries in the Friday the 13th series.  Likewise, I wonder why Linnea Quigley’s hot-pink harlequin bimbo look from Night of the Demons hasn’t inspired decades of Halloween costumes among the horror savvy.  It might be her at her most iconic, give or take her graveyard punk look from Return of the Living Dead or her chainsaw-bikini combo from the cover of the Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout VHS.

If there are any lessons in horror marathon programming here, it might just be in the attention paid to pacing. I love giallo & J-horror just as much as the next schlock junkie, but I was excited to watch objectively worse movies than Ringu & Black Lace just to make sure I didn’t end up using my pizza as a greasy pillow.  Also, if you have to improvise your lineup on the fly, you might be surprised by the connections that arise from the last-minute entries.  All four movies in this particular lineup were about cursed spaces haunted by the sins of the past — violence that lingers in the landscape where it took place, to the point of supernatural phenomena.  In Messiah of Evil & Night of the Demons, that violence is perpetuated by otherworldly embodiments of pure Evil.  In The Changeling & The Burning, it’s perpetuated in acts of revenge for personal wrongs of the recent past.  All four films are connected by the tropes & traditions of horror as a storytelling medium & communal practice, a connection strengthened by a well-informed, horror savvy audience who stays immersed in that milieu year-round.  More practically, though, what I learned is that the Alamo Drafthouse experience makes total sense in that movie marathon context.  I cannot imagine a more comfortable venue where I could binge four horror movies in a row, save for my living room.  And since I’m unlikely to invite 200 strangers to my house to watch a surprise horror movie lineup, even that caveat is moot.  If there were a New Orleans branch of the Alamo Drafthouse, I’d attend the Dismember the Alamo marathon every year with religious devotion.  I’d just hope that they’d stick it way out in the suburbs of Metairie or St. Bernard so that it’s competing with AMC instead of our humble indie spots like The Prytania, who’ve done a great job restoring Canal Place to its former glory.

-Brandon Ledet 

Messiah of Evil (1973)

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A truly cursed relic of Lovecraftian grindhouse schlock, the mid-70s horror curio Messiah of Evil is an experience that feels at once warmly familiar & nightmarishly uncanny. It’s among a rare breed of horror classics like Carnival of Souls, Eyes Without a Face, and Val Lewton’s Cat People that are deceptively obedient to the tones, tropes, and craft of their era, but manage to achieve an unnerving, bone-deep chill once that familiarity lowers your defenses. Yet, it hasn’t yet been showered with the adoring cinephilic praise reserved for those now-canon genre relics. You can approximate a nearly exact equation of what genre pieces were assembled to create its effect; it plays like a post-Romero attempt at adapting “Shadows over Innsmouth” as an American giallo. However, you can’t quite put your finger on how these familiar pieces add up to such an eerie, disorienting experience. That’s just pure black movie magic, the goal all formulaic horrors should strive for but few ever achieve.

This film’s loose dream-logic narrative is constructed through two epistolary accounts: the narrated recollections of a young woman who’s been committed to an insane asylum and the diary of her missing father, which led her to that confinement. The father character is an artist who moved to a secluded seaside town in order to paint in peace, only to mysteriously cut off communication with his family back home while away. His daughter is met with skeptical hostility from the ghoulish, Innsmouth-like townies in the village where he disappeared, but eventually settles into his home and searches for clues to his whereabouts. Surrounded by her father’s art on sinisterly muraled walls and lost in his diary that seemingly documented a descent into madness, she follows the missing artist’s exact path and gradually loses her own grip on reality. She finds some welcome company from fellow outsiders also investigating the town’s paranormal allure, but mostly she & her new friends are dangerously outnumbered by the cannibalistic, ghoulish locals who are protecting some cosmic secret no one can seem to put into words.

In terms of conveying a clear, logical narrative, Messiah of Evil is a total mess – seemingly making shit up on the fly as it bides time between its set-piece scares. This deliberate delay of traditional horror movie payoffs is a blatantly practical tactic for the barebones production to cut financial corners, which often reduces what’s onscreen to a sight that usually tanks cheap-o horrors into total tedium: people endlessly talking in closed rooms. Whether our troubled heroine is reading her father’s journals to herself in voice-over narration or chatting up the traveling throuple of erudite snobs who prove to be her only friends in town, however, Messiah of Evil is somehow never boring. It must be that the writing itself is especially strong. Monologues about “blood moons pulling people towards Hell” and Lovecraftian accounts of hallucinatory beasts & ghouls are so intensely vivid in their imagery & delivery that you don’t have room to notice that the film is saving money by describing these horrors instead of depicting them. It weighs on you like a harrowing stage play, when it so easily could have been corners-cutting lip service.

Luckily, the dialogue doesn’t have to do all the work in unnerving the audience. Messiah of Evil occasionally ventures out of tis spooky-murals artist’s loft locale to stumble through a funhouse of assorted scares. A few sideshow attractions like a ghoulish local slitting an outsider’s throat or gnawing on a live beach rat help space out its more complexly staged set piece scares. When it really invests its time on those larger atmospheric payoffs, the movie has a way of transforming everyday locales—movie theaters, supermarkets, parking lots, etc.—into otherworldly nightmare realms. The actual flesh-eating creatures that pose a threat to all outsiders here aren’t especially distinct from the undead ghouls of Romero’s landmark horror The Night of the Living Dead from just a few years earlier. Yet, their effect on the audience & their impetus to kill are so difficult to put your finger on that calling them “zombies” would be selling them short. Zombies you can figure out & plan to defeat. By contrast, the threats here keep shifting & changing the rules based on the whims of the tone, so that trying to wrap your mind around their nature & vulnerabilities feels like training yourself to slip into a lucid dream.

The married couple who wrote, directed, and produced Messiah of Evil—Gloria Katz & Willard Huyk—later developed a professional relationship with George Lucas that culminated in their swing-for the-fences, career-ending flop in 1986’s Howard the Duck. Whether you want to take that association with Howard the Duck as confirmation that this movie is an unstructured mess, a once-in-a-lifetime miracle of movie magic, or—in my rare case—further proof that Howard the Duck is vastly underappreciated is up you entirely. Personally, I believe Katz & Huyk to have an innate artistic understanding of the subliminal, dreamlike state movies put us in – logic be damned. That sensibility obviously displeased most audiences who caught their money-torching blockbuster, but it might be more widely accessible when rooted in the tradition of cheap-o moody horror. When the missing artist’s journal explains that, ”You’re about to awaken when you dream that you’re dreaming,” the potency of this film’s surreal nightmare logic became vividly clear to me – even if the structure & rhythms of the story it was telling never did. That’s not an easy effect to achieve, and many better-respected horror movies have failed in the attempt, so it’s a shame that Katz & Huyk haven’t received more audible recognition for the feat.

-Brandon Ledet