Shortly after the end of the famous Woodstock music festival, a hippie-hating local (Tige Andrews) goes out to the now-deserted festival grounds and attempts to destroy the stage. Since the stage is still attached to the power lines, he ends up getting electrocuted. He survives, but now, whenever there’s an electrical storm, he turns into a hippie-hating werewolf. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, depending on how you look at it), the world’s most clean-cut hippie band has shown up in town so that they can say they performed at Woodstock.
The plot of The Werewolf of Woodstock sounds like a comedy, but the movie takes itself fairly seriously. Most of the film’s campiness appears to be unintentional. Producer Dick Clark was able to rope a fairly respectable cast into appearing in this short film. Along with Tige Andrews as the werewolf, Andrew Stevens appears as a member of the band, while Belinda Balaski plays a groupie who gets kidnapped by the werewolf. Michael Parks and Meredith MacRae show up as two big-city cops who are called in to deal with the town’s werewolf problem. I believed that Tige Andrews really did hate the hippies with every fiber of his being, but otherwise, no one seems that invested in their roles.
Is the movie worth watching? It is, just because it’s short and there’s a scene where the werewolf steals a dune buggy. I watched it on a Russian site, though it wasn’t a very good upload. It doesn’t appear that it’s even been released on DVD or Blu-ray. I’m surprised. I would think some company would have released it just for the title alone.
In 2021’s A Deadly Grudge, Lindsey (Annika Foster) owns a restaurant with her fiancé Gavin (Jonathan Stoddard). (It’s a Lifetime film and, in the world of Lifetime, there’s nothing easier than owning your own restaurant or opening your own art gallery.) Her father, Jim (Patrick M.J. Finerty), is internet-famous for his cooking videos. And her mother… well, she’s dead. She dies while she’s out jogging and a car runs her over. What’s odd is that she doesn’t bother to get out of the way of the car despite having several minutes in which to do so. It’s always strange to me how people in Lifetime films always seem to end up jogging in the middle of the road. I start nearly every morning with a jog and I usually manage to stay on the sidewalk. It’s just safer that way.
At her mother’s funeral, Lindsey is shocked to see Jim hugging a younger woman. Lindsey immediately assumes that Jim is having an affair, because why else would you hug someone at a funeral? Jim explains that the younger woman is actually Sarah (Aubrey Reynolds). Sarah is not his mistress. Sarah is his daughter. It turns out that Lindsey never learned that she had a half-sister. Lindsey also didn’t know that her parents never actually got married. Instead, Jim was legally married to Sarah’s mother because Sarah’s family would have disowned her if she had a child out of wedlock. To be honest, not a single part of Jim’s story makes any sense, but somehow Lindsey accepts it.
To continue being honest, it’s pretty obvious that Sarah was the one who ran over Lindsey’s mother. If you’ve ever seen a Lifetime film, you know that Sarah’s guilty, because long-lost siblings are always guilty. In typical Lifetime fashion, Lindsey is immediately suspicious of Sarah, but everyone else loves her. Jim is especially happy when he discovers that Sarah knows how to bake. Whoops — Sarah put some cinnamon in one of her recipes! Lindsey is deathly allergic to cinnamon! It never ceases to amaze me how every Lifetime film seems to feature at least one person with a deadly food allergy. I always get the feeling that Lifetime studios must be full of discarded EpiPens.
The title refers to Sarah, who definitely does have a grudge against Lindsey. However, it could also refer to Lindsey, who takes an immediate dislike to her half-sister and who spends the entire movie getting mad about the fact that not everyone else seems to hate her as much as she does. More like Two Sisters’ Grudges, to be honest. (The film was also released as A Sister’s Grudge, which is closer, but still only counts one of them.) It actually gets kind of amusing after a little while. Every time someone says anything nice about Sarah, Lindsey scowls and dramatically rolls her eyes. Occasionally, she gasps in disbelief. She’s so vocal about her dislike of Sarah that you actually end up feeling a little bit sorry for Sarah. I mean, Sarah is the one who grew up with an unstable mom and the knowledge that her father had another family that he loved more than her.
Anyway, this is pretty much a standard Lifetime melodrama. Unfortunately, no one in the film is particularly sympathetic. Lindsey comes across like someone who would talk about you behind your back. Sarah comes across like she would try to poison you with cinnamon. I’ll let you decide which is worse.
In Brookfield, Connecticut, a 20-something man named Kenny Miller (played by a young Kevin Bacon) is on trial for murder. He stands accused of killing his landlord for no clear reason. While the media (represented by Cloris Leachman and Ken Kercheval) watch, Kenny’s attorney (Richard Masur) announces that Kenny did not actually commit the murder of his own free will. Instead, Kenny was possessed by a demon. The judge (Jack Davidson) is not impressed by the argument.
The film flashes back to the previous year. The family of Kenny’s girlfriend, Nancy Frazier (Liane Langland), has moved into a new house. Kenny notices that Nancy’s younger brother, Brian (Charles Fields), seems to spend a lot of time talking to himself. This concerns Kenny. What if Brian is talking to a demon that’s trying to possess him? It turns out that the Fraziers should have listened to Kenny because soon the house is shaking, the lights are blinking, and Brian is speaking in the voice of Harvey Fierstein.
The family gets in contact with occult investigators Guy (Andy Griffith) and Charlotte Harris (Beverlee McKinsey). Guy and Charlotte arrange for an exorcism. Actually, they arrange for several exorcisms. A total of six priests (one of whom is played by Eddie Albert) attempt to get the demon out of Brian. At one point, Kenny dares the demon to take him on personally. “Never do that!” Guy says before explaining that daring a demon to fight you is a great way to get possessed yourself. Kenny doesn’t seem to believe Guy, and I can kind of understand why. Watching this film, it was obvious that Andy Griffith was not actually Catholic, even if he did play a priest in Go Ask Alice. You can always tell these fake Catholics because they never make the sign of the cross correctly. They either use the wrong hand, or they start at the chest, or they confuse which shoulder to go to.
The Demon Murder Case was made for television in 1983 and, if the plot sounds familiar, that’s because it’s based on the same case that was dramatized in The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. Only the names have been changed. Ed and Lorraine Warren become Guy and Charlotte Harris and, needless to say, they’re a bit less glamorous in the made-for-television version. Surprisingly enough, the television version actually works pretty well. The low budget forces director William Hale to concentrate on atmosphere as opposed to special effects, and the cast is full of talented actors. Even though Griffith is not a convincing Catholic, he’s still likable in the role of the no-nonsense Guy, and Kevin Bacon does a pretty good job as the well-meaning but ultimately confused Kenny Miller. Earlier today, I complained that Bacon seemed miscast in Hollow Man. This film, however, makes good use of his down-to-earth persona. You watch this film and you think that, if Kevin Bacon could get possessed, it could happen to anyone.
As for the actual case, Arne Cheyenne Johnson (who was renamed Kenny Miller in this film) was convicted of manslaughter despite his defense that he had no control over his actions. He served five months in prison and married his girlfriend after he was released. He continues to insist that he was possessed.
“If you look for me, you will find me,” announces a billboard outside the apartment inhabited by a young man named Santos (Miguel Ortiz). The billboard also features a picture of a woman who appears to be beckoning whoever is viewing her. When Santos steps out of his apartment, he stares at the billboard. Later, under far different circumstances, he asks, “What was I supposed to find?”
Santos is an aspiring musician who lives in post-Franco Spain. At a performance, he sees another man flirting with his girlfriend. Suddenly, Santos finds himself standing in front of the man with blood on his hands. The man has been stabbed. There’s never any doubt that Santos killed the man, but the film leaves it ambiguous as to whether the murder was an act of impulse or calculation.
Santos spends two years in prison before he’s paroled. On his first night out, he meets a prostitute named Lola (Giannina Facio) and goes to a mansion with her. The next morning, he has breakfast with four old, rich men who tell Santos that they want to hunt him. If he can escape the grounds of the mansion, he will have a million dollars’ worth of gems to start a new life with. When Santos says that he’s not interested in being hunted, the men reply that he doesn’t really have a choice.
The thing that one notices is that Santos rarely shows any emotion. Whether he’s just killed a man or been informed that he’s going to be hunted, Santos is pretty much a blank. Even when he learns that one of the men who will be hunting him is also the father of the person he killed, Santos seems to shrug it off. Some of that was undoubtedly due to the acting limitations of Miguel Ortiz. But as the film progresses, it becomes obvious that Santos is as much of a hollow shell as the decadent men who are hunting him. If Santos seems empty, that’s because he is empty. The hunters, who obviously expected him to be easy prey, instead find themselves up against a sociopath who is just as determined as they are to get revenge. What began as just another rip-off of The Most Dangerous Game instead becomes a look into the world of absolute zero. There is no empathy, guilt, warmth, or mercy. The billboard invites the viewer to “find me,” but there is nothing to find.
Released in 1984, Poppers is a Spanish film and, to understand it, it helps to know a little about Spanish history. General Francisco Franco was the head of the Spanish government from 1936 to 1975. (My grandmother was born in Spain and came to the United States shortly after World War II. Growing up, I was usually the only kid in class to have encyclopedic knowledge of General Franco.) Franco died in 1975, nine years before Poppers was released. After being ruled for nearly forty years by one man, Spain’s transition from Franco’s regime to a more democratic system was not always an easy or smooth one, especially with Franco himself having been such a controversial figure. In Poppers, the hunters are the type of older rich men who presumably did what they had to do to thrive under Franco’s regime. (At least two of the hunters are gay, which was illegal in Francoist Spain, leaving one to wonder what they did to remain free and rich while so many others were being imprisoned or exiled.) Santos and Lola represent the next generation, the one that grew up largely without Franco. When they go after the hunters, they can be seen to represent the youth sweeping away the remains of Franco’s Spain. However, since neither Santos nor Lola are motivated by any ideology beyond their own self-preservation, the message seems to be that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Santos and Lola are not class warriors and they’re not political dissidents. They’re two people who are as empty as the people they’re replacing.
Poppers is an interesting and always watchable film. At times, the film’s imagery borders on the surreal. Director José María Castellví had a good eye for decadence. Ultimately, though, it’s a film that leaves you feeling uneasy. The closest thing the film has to a hero is a sociopath who takes a bit too much joy in killing. (The fact that all of the people he kills are bad does not make his demented smile any less unsettling.) The billboard asks us to look, but all we see is a world defined by absolute zero.
In the 2000 film Hollow Man, Kevin Bacon stars as Sebastian Caine. Sebastian is a brilliant scientist who has created a serum that, when taken, will turn someone invisible. It’s quite an accomplishment, but you get the feeling that no one’s particularly happy about Sebastian being the one who discovered it. That’s because Sebastian is an arrogant narcissist who is not only a bit of a perv but who also listens to terrible prog rock whenever he’s driving around town. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned in the past, I am firmly of the opinion that progressive rock is the music of evil people, and no film makes that argument clearer than Hollow Man.
Having already successfully tested the serum on a gorilla, Sebastian decides to take the experiment a step further and take the serum himself. Soon, Sebastian is invisible. At first, Sebastian is content to play mean but ultimately harmless pranks on his colleagues, but soon his behavior grows worse and worse. Is the serum causing Sebastian to lose his mind, or has being invisible allowed Sebastian to reveal his true self? It’s not easy to say, because Sebastian was hardly a likable guy before he took the serum. He’s always been a jerk and, even before taking the serum, he was already obsessed with both his ex-girlfriend Sarah (Elisabeth Shue) and his next-door neighbor (Rhona Mitra). What is certain is that Sebastian soon becomes addicted to his invisibility. Whenever the serum wears off, he resents the tests that his colleagues put him through. The invisible man starts to stalk and kill his colleagues.
Oh, this film. Hollow Man is an update of The Invisible Man, but it doesn’t quite work. The first time that I saw this movie, I thought it seemed to be excessively mean-spirited, but I figured that, since it was a Paul Verhoeven film, there had to be some sort of satiric subtext to all of the blood and the sexual violence. But then I read an interview with Verhoeven where he said that Hollow Man was the most impersonal of his American films and that it was also a film that he felt any director could have made. Verhoeven said that making the film was such a discouraging experience for him that, despite the film’s box office success, it still inspired him to leave Hollywood and return to Europe.
The film is relentlessly cruel. The actors who play Sebastian’s colleagues — Shue, Josh Brolin, Joey Slotnick, Kim Dickens, Greg Grunberg, Mary Randle, and William Devane — are all likable, but they’re also stuck playing stock characters who have to do stupid things so that they can be in a position to die in the most gruesome ways possible. (The scene where Grunberg’s neck starts spurting blood is particularly grotesque.) With the exception of a scene where an invisible Sebastian drives around Los Angeles, there’s very little of Verhoeven’s trademark wit. Perhaps if this film were a low-budget grindhouse film, it would be more fun. As it is, the admittedly effective special effects just leave you wondering if any of that money could have been spent on a better script.
It’s also hard to watch Kevin Bacon play such an unlikable character. It’s not that Bacon can’t play villains. It’s just that he projects such a down-to-earth, blue-collar attitude that he feels miscast as a mad scientist. Sometimes, he seems to be trying too hard in the role. If there’s anything that we should have learned from Flatliners, it’s that Kiefer Sutherland should play the mad scientist while Kevin Bacon plays the guy who understands how dangerous an uncontrolled experiment can be. Bacon should have been the one saying, “You’re going to make yourself invisible? Are you stupid or something?”
In 1959’s Night of the Ghouls, con man Dr. Alcula (Kenne Duncan) moves into Bela Lugosi’s old mansion and pretends to talk to the dead. What Alcula doesn’t realize is that the house is actually haunted (by Tor Johnson’s Lobo, among others) and real ghosts don’t appreciate pretend ghosts.
What can you say about a film like of Night of the Ghouls? It’s an Ed Wood film, with all that suggests. However, how can you resist a film that starts with Criswell sitting up in his coffin and providing commentary?
The role of Dr. Alcula was originally written for Bela Lugosi. After Lugosi’s death, veteran actor and longtime Wood friend Kenne Duncan got the role instead. Also of note, Wood appears twice in this film. Not only does his picture appear on a wanted poster in the police station but Wood also plays one of the ghouls.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but nothing has been fine. And everything’s been getting worse every second.” — Eric
Evil Dead does not tiptoe around its legacy; it kicks the cabin door open, grabs the Necronomicon, and buries the audience under gallons of blood. Fede Alvarez’s 2013 soft reboot faced the nearly impossible task of revisiting Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, a cult horror landmark so tied to its handmade weirdness, manic energy, and eventual dark-comedy sensibility that a straight duplicate would have been pointless. Alvarez wisely does not try to replace the original. Instead, he takes its basic framework—the isolated cabin, the Book of the Dead, a group of doomed young people, and an escalating demonic outbreak—and reshapes it into something more polished, more punishing, and much more relentlessly nasty.
The major difference is tone. Raimi’s original had a rough, handmade quality that made every improvised effect, wild camera move, and strange performance feel like part of its identity. It was scary, but it was also energized by a kind of reckless invention. Alvarez’s Evil Dead goes in another direction. It is slicker, more controlled, and deeply mean-spirited in a way that makes the cabin feel less like a creepy vacation spot and more like a rotting death trap. This is not a winking horror-comedy, at least not until the violence becomes so excessive that it starts circling back around into stunned laughter. For most of its running time, the movie plays things brutally straight. It wants the audience to feel trapped in that filthy cabin right alongside the characters, watching every injury worsen and every possible escape route close off.
That seriousness is actually one of the film’s smartest choices. The cabin trip is no longer just a random weekend getaway that turns into hell. Mia, played by Jane Levy, is being brought to the family cabin by her brother David and a few friends so she can detox from heroin. It is a grim premise, but it gives the story a real emotional spine. Mia’s friends and family are not merely there to be picked off one by one; they are trying, however imperfectly, to help her survive something terrifying before any supernatural force enters the picture. When Mia starts seeing horrific things, the others initially assume she is suffering withdrawal symptoms or trying to manipulate them into letting her leave. That adds a nasty layer of uncertainty to the setup. The audience knows something evil is happening, but the people around Mia have a believable reason not to trust her.
Jane Levy carries a huge amount of the movie. Mia has to move through several different modes: vulnerable, furious, terrified, possessed, exhausted, and eventually almost mythic in her determination to survive. It would have been easy for the movie to turn her into either a helpless victim or a standard final girl, but Levy gives her enough rawness that she feels like a person fighting two battles at once. She is struggling with addiction, family resentment, and an actual demonic infection spreading through the cabin. Her performance gets more intense as the movie goes on, and by the final act she has become one of the more memorable protagonists in the franchise.
The supporting cast is less developed, though that is partly by design. David, played by Shiloh Fernandez, is Mia’s estranged brother and the closest thing the film has to a traditional lead for much of the first half. Lou Taylor Pucci’s Eric is the unfortunate idiot who reads from the Necronomicon despite the book being wrapped in barbed wire, marked with warnings, and seemingly designed to scream “do not open this.” Still, the movie at least gives him more guilt than the average horror-movie fool. Once he realizes what he has unleashed, Eric spends much of the film trying to help Mia and clean up his mistake. Olivia and Natalie are thinner characters, but the film uses them effectively as different stages of the Deadite infection and as delivery systems for some especially vile set pieces.
And that is where Evil Dead really earns its reputation. The film’s violence is not merely bloody; it is aggressive, tactile, and determined to make the audience squirm. Needles, glass, nail guns, electric carving knives, box cutters, hot water, exposed nerves, severed limbs—Alvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues treat the cabin like a giant torture chamber filled with household objects waiting to become weapons. The gore is so over-the-top that it becomes almost operatic. There is a clear effort to make every major injury feel specific rather than generic. This is not just people getting slashed in dark rooms. The movie wants viewers to remember exactly what happened, which is why several scenes are difficult to shake even after the credits roll.
What makes the carnage work is the heavy use of practical effects. The film has digital touch-ups here and there, but it mostly wants blood, makeup, prosthetics, and physical messiness in the frame. That choice connects it directly to the old-school horror tradition that made the original The Evil Dead so memorable. Alvarez has a cleaner visual style than Raimi, but he does not make the mistake of turning the Deadites into sleek CGI monsters. They look diseased, swollen, burned, cut open, and horribly physical. The cabin itself is just as important. It is damp, dark, decaying, and full of corners that seem infected before anyone even opens the book.
The film also knows how to use the iconography of the series without becoming trapped by it. The Book of the Dead is immediately recognizable, but it is presented as a more grotesque object than ever: bound in human skin, wrapped in barbed wire, and full of disturbing images and warnings that practically dare someone to ignore them. There are nods to Raimi’s films, including a familiar yellow Oldsmobile and the expected cabin imagery, but Alvarez avoids simply repeating Ash Williams’s story. Bruce Campbell’s Ash is such a distinct character that trying to replace him outright would have been a disaster. Instead, Evil Dead makes Mia its own survivor and lets her final confrontation stand apart from the earlier movies.
The biggest criticism of Alvarez’s film is also a fair one: it can feel almost too grim. The original movies had a wild punk-rock sense of fun—raw, fast, messy, inventive, and powered by the kind of reckless confidence that turns limitations into personality. Alvarez’s soft reboot abandons that punk-rock attitude almost entirely. If Raimi’s The Evil Dead feels like a sweaty, chaotic garage band ripping through a horror song at maximum volume, Alvarez’s Evil Dead is the Norwegian black-metal version: colder, uglier, more nihilistic, and committed to burying the audience under mud, blood, grief, and cruelty. It is still extreme, but it is extreme in a much more punishing key.
That is not automatically a flaw, even if it may leave fans of the original’s humor missing the unhinged fun. Alvarez is not trying to make a Raimi imitation. He makes a full-blooded, punishing horror film that takes the mythology seriously while still delivering the series’ essential pleasures: demonic possessions, a cursed cabin, practical gross-out effects, and enough blood to drown a small town. The dialogue is occasionally stiff, some of the supporting characters never become much more than targets, and the addiction metaphor can be a little blunt, but those weaknesses do not erase the film’s commitment or craft.
The climax is where the movie finally fully embraces the outrageousness that defines the franchise. Mia’s fight against the Abomination during a literal rain of blood is ridiculous in the best possible way. It is gruesome, excessive, and visually unforgettable. The movie has spent so long tightening the screws that this ending feels like an explosion of all the pent-up insanity it had been holding back. It is not as funny as Evil Dead II or Army of Darkness, but it absolutely understands that an Evil Dead finale should be bigger, wetter, louder, and more deranged than logic permits.
Ultimately, Evil Dead works because it treats the source material with respect without treating it like museum property. It is nastier than the original, more emotionally grounded, and less playful, but it is still recognizably part of the same cursed family tree. Alvarez’s version may not have the handmade chaos or goofy charm of Raimi’s The Evil Dead, but it has its own savage identity. More importantly, it proved the franchise could move forward without simply repeating Ash Williams’s story. Its grimy, practical-effects-heavy, emotionally brutal approach became the blueprint for the modern Evil Dead films that followed, including Evil Dead Rise and Evil Dead Burn, even as each one found a new setting, cast, and nightmare to unleash. Evil Dead Rise moved the carnage from the cabin into a cramped apartment building, while Evil Dead Burn carried that modern branch of the series forward with another standalone story connected to the same larger Deadite universe.
For viewers who want horror movies to go all the way—who want the blood to spray, the limbs to fly, and the final girl to earn every second of her survival—it remains one of the strongest horror remakes of its era.
In The Ground Beneath Our Feet, Emma Bryant (Elliana McKean) is a teenager who feels lost. Her school has drab lighting and is full of teachers who don’t seem to care and bullies who terrorize the hallways. When she gets cast in the school musical, it turns out that it’s a sacrilegious dirge written by a drama teacher who obviously has issues of her own. (“Thank God I don’t need God!” a typical song goes.) Her grandparents aren’t going to be happy about that! For that matter, they also probably wouldn’t approve of her crush on simple-minded football star Aiden (Cooper Southfield).
Hidden away in the corners of her grandparents’ home is a diary that was written by Emma’s great-aunt Evelyn. Reading it, she learns about how, in the 1950s, Evelyn (Mirabelle Bishaw) watched as her sister Mary (Ruby Eisenberg) fell under the influence of a no-good boyfriend named Roy (Eric Johnson) and a Math teacher who rarely taught about Math and instead would spend the entire class talking about his atheism.
The film flashes back and forth, from the 50s to 2024. There’s even a brief stopover in the 70s. That’s actually an intriguing premise and the film does make an effort to show how history repeats itself. The alienation that Mary felt in the 50s is much like the alienation that Emma feels in 2024. Unfortunately, the film itself really doesn’t have the budget to convincingly recreate the 50s, beyond featuring a few vintage cars. Indeed, the film’s version of the 50s feels almost like a parody. All of the dialogue has the sound of a writer trying to duplicate the rhythms of an era that they don’t know much about beyond what they’ve seen on television or in other movies. And while Mirabelle Bishaw, Ruby Eisenberg, and Eric Johnson all do a good job in the 50s scenes, the actors playing their friends and acquaintances deliver their lines almost robotically. It’s a bit disconcerting to listen to some of them.
The main theme running through this film is that people are very easily led. That’s not necessarily a bad theme. The truth of the matter is the most people are easily manipulated, especially by authority figures like teachers. (Myself, I tend to assume that everyone is wrong except for me. And while that may be preferable to being easily influences, it still comes with its own set of difficulties.) In the modern scenes, Emma listens as a friend of her grandmother’s explains that her granddaughter has fallen away from the church because she read a set of “fantasy book” that led to her becoming an occultist. That’s something that often seems to happen in faith-based films but I have to say that I don’t buy it. Don’t blame the books just because your granddaughter apparently can’t think for herself. People are responsible for their own decisions, regardless of how easily led they may be.
This film was definitely better-made than the average faith-based film. The movie actually looked like a real movie. Elliana McKean was sympathetic and likable as Emma. The story was a bit difficult to follow. The nonlinear style of storytelling has become very popular nowadays but it really does require a fine eye for detail to truly make it work. I doubt it will convert anyone but at least the film felt like a professional production.
Before Marjoe Gortner was an actor, he was a preacher.
Actually, that might be a bit too glib on my part. According to Marjoe, he was never more of an actor than when he was standing under a tent and preaching.
The 1972 documentary Marjoe opens with footage of a four-year-old Marjoe Gortner wearing a white button-down shirt and a bow tie and preaching about how all the sinners are going to burn in Hell. We watch as young Marjoe performs a marriage. We see his parents beaming as Marjoe delivers a fire-breathing sermon. In a voice-over, an adult Marjoe Gortner explains that he was named after Mary and Joseph and that both of his parents were active on the Pentecostal revival circuit. His father was a preacher. At four years old, Marjoe became the world’s youngest ordained preacher. Marjoe talks about how the novelty of a child preacher drew in crowds. By the time he was 14, he had brought in over four million dollars to his family’s ministry. When crowds turned out to be less interested in a teenage preacher than they had been in a child preacher, Marjoe’s father left the family and took the money with him.
We cut to Marjoe Gortner at 27. He’s tall, a little bit gawky. He has curly hair and a beak-like nose. He’s not exactly handsome, but when he speaks, he still has the charisma that once made him a superstar in evangelical circles. He’s talking to a documentary crew who are about to follow him on what he says will be his final revival tour. Marjoe claims that, even as a child, he never really believed or even understood what he was preaching. He was raised to perform, and that’s what he did. Now, Marjoe says that he’s had a crisis of conscience. In public, he’s still a fire-and-brimstone preacher who claims to be able to heal the sick and whose rhythmic sermons cause people to dance, speak in tongues, and give away their money. (The money, Marjoe explains, is the important part.) He preaches against drugs and sin and anyone who believes differently than he does. In private, Marjoe is a pot-smoking beatnik (and indeed, beatnik would be the right term to use because Marjoe’s a bit too cynical to be considered a hippie) who enjoys hanging out with the same people that he condemns from the stage.
The documentary features a lot of footage of Marjoe at various revival meetings, preaching and showing off the moves that he says he copied from Mick Jagger. We watch as Marjoe has an awkward reunion with his estranged father, who shows up to preach under the same tent as his son. We watch as Marjoe repeatedly counts his money. Marjoe revels in being a showman and admits that he still loves the feeling of holding the emotions of his audience in the palm of his hand. As creepy as the footage sometimes is, there’s a definite elitism to the documentary crew, of which they don’t really seem to be aware. Of course, the film seems to be saying, this would happen in the South. We Northerners are too smart to fall for Marjoe’s act. And yet, just the fact that they’re filming him shows that they have fallen for his act. They just don’t realize it.
While the revival footage is indeed fascinating (one can really feel the audience getting swept up in Marjoe’s sermons), the film’s most interesting moments are when we see Marjoe talking to the documentarians. For all the talk about how he wants to finally be himself, Marjoe never stops performing. Even when he’s confessing and claiming to be telling the truth, Marjoe is acting. One gets the feeling that performing is all that Marjoe ever knew, and certainly it makes it easy to understand why, in the years following this documentary, he found success as a character actor. There’s never a moment in the documentary in which Marjoe isn’t “on.” In the end, one gets the feeling that he’s conning the documentarians just as easily as he’s conning the faithful. When Marjoe says that he is “bad but not evil,” it ultimately feels like another performance. Marjoe spends the documentary taking viewers behind the scenes, and yet he’s as much of an enigma at the end of the documentary as he was at the beginning. He’s a fascinating character, if only because it’s impossible to tell how much of anything is real to him.
(Indeed, watching Marjoe, I was reminded of Elizabeth Holmes’s disturbingly empty smile in the trailer for the upcoming documentary You Can See Everything.)
Released in 1972, Marjoe won the Oscar for Best Documentary. Marjoe Gortner, who passed away last week at the age of 82, had a lengthy acting career, one in which he often played con men and other outlaws. His final role was in 1995’s Wild Bill. He played a preacher. My favorite Gortner role will always be as Akton in 1978’s Starcrash.
1963’s House of the Damned tells the story of an isolated mansion. It’s a place that many people have tried to live in but no one has ever been willing to stick around for too long. There are rumors that the mansion is haunted. In fact, you could even make the claim that the mansion is a house of the damned! Of course, we all know that there’s no such thing as ghosts, right?
Joseph Schiller (Richard Crane), the new owner of the mansion, calls architect Scott Campbell (Rob Foster) and tells him to go up to the house and check the place out. Scott points out that he was planning on celebrating his anniversary with his wife, Nancy (Merry Anders). Joseph say that there is no better way to celebrate an anniversary than to visit a house that might be haunted. Scott and Nancy (who is amazingly understanding) head for the house, where all sorts of strange things happen.
What type of strange things? Keys disappear. There are weird noises. Sometimes, it seems like something or someone might be lurking in the shadows. Could the house be haunted? While Scott and Nancy try to figure out what’s going on, Joseph shows up with his wife, Loy (Erika Peters). When Loy disappears, it becomes obvious that something is happening in the house of the damned!
House of the Damned is a briskly paced and occasionally effective haunted house story. It was directed by Maury Dexter, who was a director who was so fast and so capable of stretching a low budget that, at his best, he gave Roger Corman a run for his money. House of the Damned is only 63 minutes long and the film’s story isn’t particularly complex but Dexter still manages to create a properly ominous atmosphere and he does keep you guessing as to whether or not the house is actually haunted. The house itself was the former estate of infamous gangster Bugsy Siegel. Dexter reportedly spent ten days filming the movie at the Spiegel estate. Hopefully, he was not bothered by Bugsy’s ghost.
None of the characters are particularly well-developed but they are well-cast and the actors are all likable. The best performance comes from Erika Peters, who plays Loy as being slightly self-absorbed but ultimately good-hearted. She also gets to wear a bathing suit that is simply to die for. This film also features a very early performance from the great Richard Kiel, playing “The Giant.” It’s always nice to see Richard Kiel in a movie. Shortly before he passed away in 2014, Kiel visited my Alamo Drafthouse for a showing of The Spy Who Loved Me. Though it was obvious that he wasn’t in great health, he still took time to answer questions and to show off a rather charming smile. When a certain redhead told him that she loved him in a beloved 90s golf comedy, he smiled and said, “I believe that jacket belongs to Mr. Gilmore.”
House of the Damned was a nice surprise. We need more 62-minute films.
1963’s House of the Damned tells the story of an isolated mansion. It’s a place that many people have tried to live in but no one has ever been willing to stick around for too long. There are rumors that the mansion is haunted. In fact, you could even make the claim that the mansion is a house of the damned! Of course, we all know that there’s no such thing as ghosts, right?
