Messiah of Evil (1974, Willard Huyck) (Patreon)

50/100

Honestly, all I want to talk about is the movie-theater sequence (which I am quite surprised to discover isn't universally regarded as Messiah's highlight; most folks single out the supermarket chowdown, which I thought notable solely for its mercantile banality—it's disturbing for more or less the same reason that Raising Arizona's supermarket chase scene is funny). Huyck seemingly possessed no formal chops, to judge from Best Defense, Howard the Duck, and 90% of this movie...but he did somehow orchestrate the only zombie (or at least zombie-adjacent) attack that qualifies as Hitchcockian suspense, basically restaging The Birds' unnerving jungle-gym setpiece with undead/possessed/whatever humans in lieu of crows. Toni sits down in a huge single-screen auditorium (ah, the '70s) so sparsely attended that there seems to be no threat at all, at least until one creepy-looking dude in the very front row turns to stare at her just as the lights dim; I kept thinking of Sharon Tate watching herself, all but alone, in a weekday matinee show of The Wrecking Crew. Then a door at the back of the house opens, and someone comes in and takes a seat several rows behind Toni. Watching the screen, not her. Then the door on the opposite side of the theater opens, and a man enters. Huyck spends several minutes cutting from the screen-within-the-screen (showing a film puckishly identified on the marquee as Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye but onscreen as the then-as-yet-unreleased Gone With the West) to close-ups of Toni munching popcorn to wide shots of the theater, with more people filling the seats behind her each time we check in (and one of the doors always visible opening in the background, admitting others), until she's finally boxed into her row on both sides and realizes that she's being stalked. It's a marvelously bone-chilling escalation that doubles, for someone like me, as the horror of having to endure latecomers flooding the theater with light and making distracting noises, though at least none of them block her view.

So there's my mini-Scenic Routes piece on Messiah of Evil's one superlative stretch. Otherwise, this is another reclaimed '70s horror movie (cf. Let's Scare Jessica to Death, which suffers from a similarly murky "all of the town's locals are mundanely evil" scenario) that I think was quite accurately judged upon release. I don't necessarily need the nature of Point Dune's messianic cult to be spelled out in tedious, anti-scary detail, but it'd be nice if there were at least a little rhyme or reason to anything that happens. Does merely spending time within city limits infect you? (If not, I missed whatever event makes Arletty start bleeding from the eye.) Why are some of the afflicted, including Arletty's father, outwardly normal, while others behave like traditional Haitian-style zombies and still are others are silent Romero-style ghouls? Why is Thom in Point Dune interviewing Charlie, and how has Charlie avoided the same fate as everyone else in town, and did Thom really need two vacuous women to accompany him on whatever his research project is? Can all such nitpicky questions simply be filed under It Was All A Crazy Lady's Delusion, as the ending may or may not suggest? Oh, right, and what does impending genre specialist Walter Hill getting his throat cut at the beginning have to do with anything? That's not their modus operandi; they just swarm and devour. Even were I the sort of viewer who ignores that stuff (which I'm very much not), Messiah of Evil doesn't offer nearly enough spooky atmosphere or memorable carnage to compensate for all the flat voiceover narration, somnambulistic acting (from characters who are supposed to be fully alive), and ostensibly groovy longueurs. I dug the production design in Dad's house and the bit that sees him covered in red and blue paint, but unfortunately Hawks' dictum was not "one great scene, two pretty good scenes, many bad scenes, a few impressive visual elements." Still, there are movies I like more overall that I'd happily trade for this one's brief zenith. Sorry, Let the Right One In.