Messiah of Evil / Messiah of the Evil Dead / Messiah of Evil: The Second Coming / Dead People / Night of the Damned / Return of the Living Dead / Revenge of the Screaming Dead / Second Coming / Blood Busters (1974) ***
Normally this kind of behind-the-scenes story is an extremely bad sign for a movie’s quality, or indeed for its mere watchability. Principal photography for Second Coming got underway at the beginning of September 1971, under the guiding hands of husband-and-wife writer/directors Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (who would subsequently win fame by helping George Lucas script American Graffiti, and infamy for making Howard the Duck on his behalf as well). Two months later, the most important investor pulled out, with shooting still unfinished. Second Comming never would be finished, either, but the existing footage was bought in 1973 (Anitra Ford— whom we’ll be meeting later— calls the buyer “a Frenchman,” but I’ve been unable to pin down his identity more specifically than that), and edited into nearly releasable form with the help of a couple artfully blurred pickup scenes and a fair bit of voiceover narration. The picture finally debuted before the public as Messiah of Evil at the tail end of 1974, after an emergency infusion of film clips from Gone with the West to fill out a crucial set-piece in the auditorium of a movie theater, then reappeared under a dazzling array of aliases as one smalltime distributor after another tried their hands at selling it to audiences. None of that bodes well, right? Especially since one of the bits that never got shot was the frigging climax, concerning the formerly titular Second Coming of the subsequently titular Messiah of Evil! But instead of turning out like the similarly unfinished Toolbox Murders, Messiah of Evil got nearly as lucky as the slightly less unfinished The Horrible Dr. Hichcock. Arty, strange, and opaque to begin with, it emerged looking almost like Huyck and Katz meant for it to be this way all along. Although I can’t say the movie as ultimately released is ever truly satisfying, Messiah of Evil feels not so much incomplete as unsettled. It’s like a bad dream from which you awaken before your subconscious has quite revealed what was supposed to be out to get you.
A young man (Walter Hill, a film-school acquaintance of Huyck and Katz, who went on to direct The Warriors and Streets of Fire) is fleeing from someone or something through the streets of a small town that we will soon come to know was Point Dune, California. A teenaged girl spots him, and invites him into the apparent sanctuary of her backyard. Then, after he collapses into an exhausted heap on the patio, she sits down beside him, cradles his head in her lap, and slashes his throat with a straight razor.
Next, rather confusingly, we jump not into the main action of the film, but into a second prologue. This time, as the camera gazes almost sightlessly down the blindingly overexposed corridor of a mental institution, a woman whom we will soon come to know as Arletty Lang (Marianna Hill, from The Astral Factor and Schizoid) rails against her confinement, warning of some apocalyptic horror gathering strength while she— who alone understands its nature— sits locked away in the asylum. You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that Arletty identifies the locus of this looming threat as the little coastal town of Point Dune.
Now for the extended flashback that comprises the bulk of Messiah of Evil’s running time. Arletty went to Point Dune in the first place because of her father, artist Joseph Lang (Royal Dano, of Ghoulies II and Killer Klowns from Outer Space). He had settled there precisely because he knew no one in the entire town, and because nothing interesting ever happened there. Peace, quiet, and freedom from distraction for the sake of his work, you see? His only contact with the outside world was the letters that he regularly wrote to his daughter, keeping her apprised of the non-events in his life. But after a while, the content of those letters became concerning. Lang started writing about strange, recurrent nightmares, sleepwalking episodes, and bouts of insomnia in which he would wander the streets of the town, convinced that barely-glimpsed inimical presences were tracking his movements. He became fascinated with a local legend about awful things that supposedly happened in Point Dune during the 19th century, climaxing on a night when the moon turned red. He started mentioning peculiar behavior among the townspeople— increasing furtiveness on those occasions when the needs of daily life brought him into contact with them, nocturnal gatherings on the beach by bonfire-light, hints of a spreading sickness that defied description or explanation. Eventually, the letters stopped coming altogether, and Arletty set out for Point Dune to investigate.
Arletty’s first encounter, on the outskirts of town, sets the pattern for most of her sojourn in Point Dune, insofar as what she experiences is disquieting, but the true horror breaks out only after she turns her back and goes on her way. When she pulls into a Mobil station to gas up her car, she finds the night shift attendant (Charles Dierkop, from City Beneath the Sea and The Hot Box) emptying a pistol into the darkness beyond the streetlights. He says he was shooting at feral dogs, although none of the muffled sounds coming from the woods in that direction sound especially canine. Then a pickup truck arrives, driven by a gangling, black albino (Bennie Robinson) who provokes the poor grease monkey to visible, barely-controlled terror. And with good reason— the tarp over the bed of the albino’s truck conceals what could equally well be several corpses, several coma patients, or several beings in some nebulous state of undeath. Arletty is too deep in her own anxieties to notice that, however, and she has long since driven off in search of her father’s seaside villa by the time the man at the gas station is killed and mutilated by a plausible approximation of Joseph Lang’s inimical presences.
Joseph is not in when Arletty reaches his home, the late hour notwithstanding, so she beds down on a mattress suspended by chains from the ceiling of his decidedly eerie studio. Nor is the proprietor of the local art gallery (Morgan Fisher) much help in the morning— although he does at least mention that someone else stopped in to inquire about Lang an hour or two ago; said he was staying at the Seven Seas hotel. The other seeker after Joseph Lang turns out to be an eccentric, libertine dandy by the name of Thom (Michael Greer, of Summer School Teachers and The Curious Female), who shares the missing artist’s interest in the legend of the Point Dune Blood Moon, and was hoping to interview him about it. When Arletty drops in on Thom and his two prickly girlfriends, Laura (the aforementioned Anitra Ford, from Invasion of the Bee Girls and The Big Bird Cage) and Toni (Joy Bang, if you can believe that, who was also in Night of the Cobra Woman and Events), at the Seven Seas, she finds him recording the reminisces of an old wino (Elisha Cook Jr., from The Night Stalker and Dead of Night) whose parents lived through the long-ago unpleasantness. The presence of a stranger seems to change old Charlie’s mind about the advisability of telling his story, however, and the frustrated Thom sends him on his way with the bottle he was promised. Arletty is let down, too, because Thom knows no more than she does about Lang’s current whereabouts. But before she can return to the villa to plan her next move, Charlie buttonholes her, and warns her that if she really loves her dad, she’s going to have to kill him and burn the body.
That night, Arletty gets a surprise visit from Thom, Laura, and Toni. Thom explains that they’ve been booted out of the Seven Seas, and turned away from every other hotel in Point Dune. Charlie’s dead, half-devoured body was discovered a little while ago, and although the vagabond weirdoes aren’t suspects, exactly, they were the last people who can be proven to have seen him alive. That’s more hassle than any of the local hoteliers want, and thus Thom and his companions are left to impose upon the one person in town whom they even sort of know. Messiah of Evil begins slowly turning up the heat at this point, as the mystery of Lang’s disappearance pins down Arletty and Thom alike in what is obviously an increasingly bad place. Joseph’s diaries weave a skein of dark hints around the villa, setting up ill omens which events in Point Dune fulfill one after another. Laura and Toni each decide that the atmosphere in the villa has become too oppressive for them, but fall victim to the very fates they were hoping to escape when they try to leave. And then the local police reveal their complicity in whatever the hell is going on here by informing Arletty that her father was found crushed to death beneath the huge, bizarre sculpture he’d been assembling out of junk on the beach just below the high tide line. What’s so incriminating about that? Only that the body they take her to see is recognizably not Joseph Lang’s, even despite its severely disfigured condition. Meanwhile, the moon looks a little bit redder each time it rises anew, and Arletty starts recognizing in herself symptoms of the uncanny disease mentioned in her father’s journals and letters…
It might be helpful to know, going into Messiah of Evil, that the exact nature of the supernatural nastiness afflicting Point Dune will never be plainly revealed, let alone explained. Then again, I didn’t know that up front, and I still found the pieces of the incomplete puzzle disturbing enough to hold my attention and to gain my appreciation, despite all the blank spaces in between. Indeed, the blank spaces are part of what makes the picture so disturbing in the first place. A seaside town in the spirit of H.P. Lovecraft’s Kingsport and Innsmouth; a survivor of the Donner Party who resurrects himself (or comes out of hiding, or something) at regular intervals, in synch with a mysterious celestial cycle; a degenerative disease that’s somehow also a cult; a rat-eating albino who abets the latter without apparently succumbing to it; roving packs of nocturnal cannibals— it’s clear that they all fit together, but it doesn’t seem like they should, and none of the joins are visible. Meanwhile, it’s a powerful testament to the care expended by editor Scott Conrad in rendering Messiah of Evil fit for release that the hastily contrived mental hospital sequences that bookend the main action come across more like conscious allusions to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari than like the desperation measures they actually were.
Conrad’s job was made easier, though, by Huyck and Katz’s masterful touch with atmospherics and imagery, which might get you thinking a bit about German Expressionism all by itself. Everything we see, beginning the moment Arletty pulls into that Mobil station with the trigger-happy attendant, plainly communicates that Point Dune is no fit place for human beings untouched by ineffable evil. Joseph Lang’s villa, the closest thing any of the characters will ever have to a safe haven within the town, is nevertheless charged with the uncanny. The studio is the least homely place of all, feeling impossibly vast thanks to the trompe l’oeil murals covering all four walls, and rendered haunted and hostile by the life-sized pop-art figures gazing out from them. Nor are the directors solely dependent on such obtrusive set design to get under the viewer’s skin. Empty streets, remote beaches, and a construction site where all work looks to have stopped each become menacing in their own ways, to say nothing of the gas station, grocery store, and movie theater that provide the venues for the film’s most intense and overt scenes of horror.
It’s during those intrusions of the nightmarish into the mundane that Messiah of Evil reveals its unexpected kinship with the early works of George Romero. Huyck and Katz are artier about it (which stands to reason, comparing their UCLA film school roots to Romero’s background making TV commercials and industrial training reels), but the things that happen in Point Dune’s most ordinary locales have a similar quality of violation to what went on in Night of the Living Dead’s Western Pennsylvania farmhouse, and to what Romero would subsequently inflict on Evans City, Braddock, and the Monroeville mall in The Crazies, Martin, and Dawn of the Dead. A similar dark incongruity suffuses the zombie-like townspeople who have fully succumbed to the Point Dune blood moon sickness as well. Huyck and Katz recruited the majority of their extras from a most curious source: the large pool of newly unemployed aerospace technicians laid off from the NASA facility in Anaheim with the winding down of the Apollo program. As befits the inhabitants of an isolated little town, these folks are noticeably older and frumpier on average than the typical horror movie zombies or cannibals. It’s always bracing to see a pretty girl hunted, killed, and eaten, but it’s something else again to see one hunted, killed, and eaten by twenty or thirty of the squarest middle-aged nerds in Southern California!
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