PHILLAN BISHOP SCORING WILLARD HUYCK'S 'MESSIAH OF EVIL'

Joy Bang in MESSIAH OF EVIL Year: 1974 Rating: ****

Married filmmakers (and AMERICAN GRAFFITI co-writers) Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz's arthouse horror MESSIAH OF EVIL has hauntingly gorgeous scream-queen Marianna Hill's narrated story-line about the search for her artist father at a beach community, pieced together in long sequences of gothic dialogue, neatly combined with three of the most eerily suspenseful moments of low-budget exploitation cinema...

Wherein monotone Michael Greer seems to be the title character, a tall stranger holed-up at her missing father's pad (his journals providing exposition) with two lovely girls, Anitra Ford and Joy Bang, each making their own separate horror-trope mistake of leaving an otherwise safe location to venture out alone... in this case into the small beach town, inland from a wave-lapping, moon-lit beach...

Anitra Ford in MESSIAH OF EVIL

After getting a lift from a towering black albino (his mere casting is exploitation itself), who had already turned up in an earlier gas station sequence setting the tense, anything-can-happen, ultra-violent tone, Anitra Ford goes into a Ralph's supermarket, coming across a group of shoppers...

Until it's revealed they're ghouls eating body parts... turning their tastes onto the doomed beauty, anticipating an upcoming sequence involving Joy Bang in an initially vacant movie theater that fills up slowly, methodically: until she's surrounded by the same eye-bleeding antagonists that'd already devoured her friend: only far more subtle and methodically nightmarish as, each in Hitchcockian fashion, the ingenues realizes the initially innocuous crowds were only there for them all along...

Anitra Ford in MESSIAH OF EVIL

As MESSIAH OF EVIL is scored by Phillan Bishop's moody synthesizer, sounding like a demonic arcade game with bursts of darkly atmospheric Moog-noises adding to the overall impending doom while exuding the right amount of atmospheric tension, scored in-between the equally creepy  SEVERED ARM and KISS OF THE TARANTULA... 

Here within a primary location adorned with spooky interior murals and life-sized character cut-outs, it's regrettable there weren't more pretty young side-starlets to lead the viewer into other creatively-shot living-dead death sequences — so we wouldn't have to wait so long in-between the truly great parts.

Anitra Ford and Joy Bang in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL with Charles Dierkop

Future director Walter Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Anitra Ford in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Joy Bang and Michael Greer in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

From MESSIAH OF EVIL

Joy Bang in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Royal Dano in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Anitra Ford in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Elijah Cook Jr. in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Bennie Robinson in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Joy Bang in MESSIAH OF EVIL

From MESSIAH OF EVIL

Michael Greer in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Phillan Bishop in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Walter Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Walter Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Michael Greer and Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Michael Greer and Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Anitra Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Joy Bang in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Michael Greer in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Anitra Ford and Michael Greer in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Anitra Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Joy Bang in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Gloria Katz in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Joy Bang in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill in MESSIAH OF EVIL

Marianna Hill and Michael Greer in MESSIAH OF EVIL

From MESSIAH OF EVIL

Joy Bang in MESSIAH OF EVIL

House of Exorcism and MESSIAH OF EVIL Marquee from ANNIE HALL