 She pulls out a straight razor and slits his throat. Ooh, what a great way to start a movie. Oh, and welcome to another episode of Freightfully Forgotten Horror Movies. But before we get started, what are we drinking? Today we're drinking Tarman Black IPA. Oh yeah. And as you can see, it's very carbonated at this point in time. It's a little old. Today we're going to bring to you 1973's Messiah of Evil. And this was a Patreon request by Alex Caliguropoulos. Messiah of Evil was directed and co-written by Willard Hewick and his wife Gloria Katz. They actually did a few famous screenplays. They did American Graffiti, Temple of Doom, and they're uncredited for work on Star Wars as well. A new whole book. Yeah, okay. Which back in our day was just Star Wars Episode 4. Yeah, like, look, fuck off. This movie stars Michael Greer, and he didn't do much for TV or movies, but he was big on the stage, big stage actor. Mariana Hill is in this, and she's in a couple of notable horror movies. She's in Schizoid with Klaus Kinski, as well as Blood Beach. She was also in a Star Trek episode, Dagger of the Mind. And you'll notice there's going to be a bit of a theme here throughout this episode. There was actually lots of actors who were in Star Trek episodes. Elijah Cook Jr. was in this, and he is also in a Star Trek episode. Court Marshall. He's also in some few famous horror movies. He's in House and Haunted Hill with Vincent Price. And he's also in Rosemary's Baby. Messiah of Evil starts off with this guy running. Gets into this backyard. There's like a pool and everything. There's a little girl standing there. Lays down, because he's all tired and everything, and he thinks that she's going to help him, and she pulls out a straight razor and slits his throat. Ooh, what a great way to start a movie. Messiah of Evil in an adventure. It then cuts to our Letty being in this institution. She's doing a narration about her dad talking about this weird town that he's in. She has to go try and find him. So she's driving towards this town. She stops at a gas station to get gas. And the gas station attendant was also in Star Trek. He's in Wolf in the Fold. And he's in... Die, die, die, everybody die. Die, die, die, every... deep space. They always beam him into deep space. They all don't care about him, like his body. And the guy was also in Silent Night Deadly Night. While she's filling up, there's another guy that pulls up in a pickup truck. This weird albino-looking guy that looks straight out of the Omega Man. The gas station attendant goes over to the pickup truck and lifts his tarp off. And he sees all these dead bodies in the back of the fucking truck. He's got to look a horror. Our Letty goes to pay him. Two bucks for gas, mind you. Aw, just nothing. Mind the blown. Imagine paying two bucks for a full tank of gas to date. Not in this day and age. Christ. He's just rushes her along, saying, don't worry about it, don't worry about it. Just get out of here, get out of here. Then it cuts and they show him sort of underneath this vehicle fixing it. The lift starts to come down on him, gets out from under it. You think it's gonna kill him? Then right away, it just cuts to the outside of the garage and you hear him screaming. He just... Our Letty pulls up to her dad's house. He's got like this crazy artsy loft, murals on the walls and paintings and crazy contrasting colors and he's got this pretty wicked pad, actually. With this bed that's hanging just by chains? This swinging bed? Like what the fuck? She finds her dad's journal and she starts going through it and you hear the narration of her dad explaining what's been going on in this town and what he's been going through, spiraling slowly into madness along with the town's people. Trying to find more answers, our Letty goes into town and she ends up running into a guy named Tom. He's got a couple of broads with him too, isn't he? Tom is interviewing this town drunk, spewing all this madness about the blood moon rising and the dark stranger returning. You find out that this Tom guy is just some rich kid who likes to go around and collect stories and legends. Whatever that means. What kind of life is that? I wish I had that life, bro. Rich and his travel around listening to people talk bullshit. Yeah, exactly. And we find out that Tom is also looking for her dad because he's a fan of her dad's art. She runs into this bum guy outside of the hotel and he says, well, if you find your dad, make sure that you kill him and put fire to his body afterwards and he kind of stumbles away, what the hell was that all about? Yeah, it's fucking weird. Our Letty's at her dad's place reading the journal and who shows up, Tom and his girls. Because they were kicked out of their hotel, they got no place to stay, so they just decided to crash with her. Well, isn't that just perfect, right? He's all coming on to her and everything. Yeah, yeah, he's all getting her to unzip that vest. He can't just unzip a man and look at him. One of the girls, Laura's, had enough of Tom and his bullshit, his swinging bullshit, and she leaves and she's walking down the highway. This truck comes up to give her a lift and she gets in. And who is it? That weird albino guy that was at the gas station talking about the blood moon, the dark stranger. And then he pulls out this mouse and starts eating it and everything. Yeah, it's fucking weirdo. So she's like, I'll get out here. And he does let her out. You think that he won't, but he does let her out. She goes into town, goes to the supermarket, pretty bare, there's nobody in there, until she gets to the meat department and there's all these weird townspeople eating raw meat at the meat counter. They see her, calmly get out of there, but she gets surrounded and lynched by all these weird townspeople and they start eating her. The other girl, Tony, she wants to go into town too and go see a movie. She goes to this old school movie theater, looks beautiful. There's nobody in there. She has the whole theater to herself. There's like one other person in the front. Slowly as she's watching the movie, every time it cuts back to her, there's more of these weird townspeople behind her looks around. She realizes it's all these people and gets kinda creeped out and goes to leave. So the doors are locked to get back in the lobby and then they surround her and kill her. Then Tom decides to go for a walk. Can't anybody just stay where the fuck they are? Then these cops pull up for like no reason and they get out of the car and they start shooting at this weird horde of people coming out of the shadows. And the one cop starts going nuts and starts killing the other cop. It's complete madness and then Tom runs back to our lady's dad's place. She's all fucked up and weird and she's like cutting herself cause she can't feel pain. Yeah, yeah, she's like sticking that needle in herself. And she's puking up all these bugs and everything. All these townspeople start storming the house and jumping through the windows. That's where we're gonna end the plot. If you wanna see how Messiah of Evil ends, keep watching. So if you're wondering what the hell all that is all about, one of the best things about this movie is the mystery slowly unfolds throughout the entire movie. It's slowly helped along by this journal, right? Feeds you little snippets and moves this plot along. Cause she doesn't read it all at once. No. She reads it bit by bit throughout the movie. This need how they use the journal as a device to feed you the plot. Each time she reads the journal, she experiences more of what her dad went through. And the plot is an interesting plot. It's different. There's kind of these zombie vampire type creatures but they don't really say that they're zombies or that they're vampires. You just know that they're crazed and they kill and they eat people but they don't define them, which I like. What's more important is this dark stranger that they talk about and this dark stranger coming back and it all has to do with him coming back. And that's where the mystery really lies is who is this dark stranger? What is he? Is he the Messiah of Evil? The atmosphere of this movie is fucking great. Dark and foreboding and the seclusion of this movie. It's like a hallmark of it, right? The atmosphere is driven very much so by both the lighting and the setting. The lighting in this movie is fantastic. Very giallo style, especially in her dad's house with all that crazy art and everything and the lighting is these very vivid blues and reds. And then I love the way they light the outside shots like at the gas station where it's lit well. You can see everyone perfectly but behind them you see just blackness. So you have no clue what's behind them in the dark. It starts off with that gas attendant like shooting at something in the darkness and he comes back to the gas station and you're like, what's out there? Yeah, you don't know. You're always wondering what's out there behind them in that complete blackness. Brilliant camera work. In her dad's house. Quite the spectacle. Yeah, it puts you off because it's got all those weird murals and they sort of makes it feel like the house keeps going. Yeah, yeah, there's like because they're three dimensional murals, right? So you think there's more there. It makes it seem bigger than what it really is, right? It's super cool. I wonder if that place was like that and they found it just to all a shoot here where if they actually painted all those murals on there they did, that's a lot of work. And it's a lot of vision too that they had. When they get into trouble and they start to run it almost seems like they can just keep running keep going through the walls. Yeah, like go that way. And because of her dad's house is kind of on this beach front the beach is also a neat setting in this movie too because near the end where you think that they're getting away and there's daytime, they're safe and no, they're still being followed by the townspeople like, oh, okay, these weird creatures come out during the daytime too. Then they get stuck in these weird cliff rock areas where they're kind of, they're fucked. Yeah. You're on the beach, what you think is just you can go anywhere, but no, you can, you're stuck now. There's even that scene too where they go into the water. Yeah. Because that's what you would do. You have nowhere else to go, you have to go into the water now. And even then, it's the setting itself that is destructive, right? Like, they can't keep swimming into nothing. Right. You know, so they're fucked again. The settings really helped build the tension and the terror. This movie does an absolute brilliant job of building tension and suspense. One of the best examples of a slow burn but it's not boring. No, no, because you're always invested, you wanna see what's gonna happen. The theater scene is a perfect example of building suspense. The characters in this movie are great, especially all the weird towns folk. Like, whenever she goes into town and runs into people, everybody's weird. The way they cast it is everyone looks kind of weird too. Nobody really looks normal in this movie. Puts you off. You don't trust anybody. Even Tom and his girls, when you run into them, at first, you don't trust them. They're involved in whatever is happening with the disappearance of her dad. You just assume it. You're wrong. They have nothing to do with it. They're just weird too, you know? Yeah. All of this is helped by the music too, right? It's got a very ominous score. The early 70s synth score, they're all just noise. The movie's very much dialogue driven because a lot of it comes from the diary. So it's all based on the dialogue and these narrations. All the narration is very poetic. It's just not in your face, this is exactly what's happening. She speaks in her mind very poetically and so does her dad in the diary. Usually a narration will just set everything up for you. In this case, it doesn't because it's this poetic mystery. Check out 1973's Messiah of Evil. It's a trip, man. Yeah, it is kind of a trip, you know? Because they are having quite the trip, right? And you're kind of experiencing it with them. And until next time, keep drinking.