During the sixties and seventies, inner city theaters - like their rural Drive-in kin - were forced to turn to more and lower budget fare to survive. Where the Drive-In tended to focus on wild teen movies, Rock 'N Roll musicals, beach movies and hot rod flicks, Grindhouses tended to run towards your rougher films - blaxploitation, sexploitation, splatter films, biker flicks, mondo, chambara epics, spaghetti westerns, women in prision films, and Shaw Brothers kung fu all packed with sensational elements designed to appeal to baser human emotions. Joe Bob Briggs said it best with the three Bs: Breasts, blood and beasts. Theater managers would operate around the clock, serving up all manner of taboo shattering smut and sleaze - a modern equivalent of the games at the Roman coliseum. The popcorn stale, the seats smelly, the company was. . . dubious at best and the prints were run down and faded from use.
As the VHS rose in popularity, both the Drive-in and the Grindhouse quickly became obsolite. While you can still occasionally find a drive-in or two around, the Grindhouse is all but extinct these days.
Well except for, ironically enough, home video.
BCI Eclipse's Welcome to the Grindhouse series serves up a double feature of dubious quality, a handful of trailers all at a ridiculously low price.
Prime Evil is the second half of this double header, and is young enough that it might not actually be considered Grindhouse material (its of a 1988 vintage, well after the decline of the Grindhouse). But it's on the disc anyway, so there you are.
As the Black Plague ravaged Europe in the 14th century, a group of monks decide that they've had enough with this whole God thing and break away from the church, throwing their lot in with Satan (of course), who then bestows wealth and immortality and all that other good stuff that you usually get in these deals. The downside is that their Dark Master demands a sacrifice every 13 years.
Fast forward to the present (well, the present as we knew it in 1988), with the cult still around and going strong - and of course coming up on the thirteenth year pretty darn quick. Enter Sister Angela (Mavis Harris), who gets the assignment from The Bishop to go undercover and infiltrate the satanic group and somehow stopping their black mass, and hopefully destroy it once and for all.
***BAD PUN ALERT***
When forced to undergo the satanic ritual initiation, Sister Angela throws her nun's uniform into a fire. She remains loyal to the Lord, proving it was a hard habit to break. Thank you - I'll be here all week. Try the veal.
Meanwhile across town, we meet Cathy, a college graduate prostitute with a law degree. Her councilor Alexandra has just set her up with a job interview over on Wall Street - but she gets kidnapped by a strong-armed goon in army fatigues, working for The Cult.
Alexandra has issues of her own. She confesses to her fiance Bill that she was molested and photographed as a child (a theme on this disc, it seems), and she's been messed up in the head ever since her grandfather George told her that pappy was "going away" (apparently cast into The Abyss, according to conversations later in the film). George, on the other hand is looking to be a very spry young eighty - not too surprising, considering he's one of the top dogs of The Cult.
Anyway George has been instructed to bring his granddaughter to the group's next sacrifice as the guest of honor! But first, she needs the "special attention" of cult leader Father Seaton and some extra special quality time with The Dark Lord. And so it goes, characters aimlessly drifting in and out of the storyline until the cultists have a big orgy, when Sister Angela believe she stabs a statue of the devil in the crotch and all the Satanists burst into fire and die. The end.
Um. . . what?
To say that Prime Evil is a confusing mess would be like saying that the Titanic had an accident. While both statements are true, they so vastly underestimate the problem it's comedic. The script is so crammed with characters that it's tough to keep track of who is who without a scorecard and flowchart. The plot moves along briskly, which is good, but the secondary characters keep piling up until I'm on the verge of exploding from information overload. This wouldn’t be so bad if these stories were coming together in a nice neat bundle at the end, but some just fizzle out and go nowhere, and some just get dropped only to re-emerge later on
Wow - never thought I'd say this about exploitation cinema, but there's just too much damn plot!
As far as acting goes, it's really no better or no worse than your average low grade eighties horror flick. The bad guys are EeeeeVIL, the cops are exceptionally goofball-ish, the boyfriend is maniac obsessive and the females are useless. Like I said, the performances are pretty much run of the mill for this sort of thing.
The film is directed by Roberta Findley, the bulk of her resume is hard core porno and cheap exploitation flicks like Snuff, The Oracle and the amazingly, horrifically bad Shriek of the Mutilated. As she has a track record of movies as long as my arm (and Prime Evil was one of the last films she did), you would think we'd at least get something creative, if not necessarily good. And while some of her scenes and setups have a nice shadowy film noir-ish look to them, the bulk of the movie is shot flat.
BREASTS ON DISPLAY: 1
EXPLOSIONS: 0
ROUNDS FIRED: 6
PUNCHES THROWN: 4
HANDRAIL DEATHS: 1
CAR CHASES: 0
FRUIT CARTS DESTROYED: 0
AFROS: 0F BOMBS DROPPED: 0
THE DVD -
Both films are presented in a widescreen ratio of 1.78 and while generally in overall less than stellar shape, Prime Evil (and Don't Answer the Phone for that matter) looks reasonable for a low budget b-movie cheapie.
THE EXTRAS -
There are no extras on the Welcome to the Grindhouse double feature disc, save for one: the Grindhouse Experience. As with other discs of the series, you can either watch each feature by itself or in the Grindhouse Experience. Watching that way, we start off with a Coming Attractions bumper, a trailer for Horror High and Werewolf vs the Vampire Women before Don't Answer the Phone runs. After Phone, we get another set of bumpers, the trailer for Blood Mania and Night of the Werewolf before Prime Evil starts.
THE BOTTOM LINE -
With a plot overflowing with characters and double dealing and stuff, there's just no focus in Prime Evil, and despite a (laughable) severed head sequence in the prologue this one is largely gore and nudity free. If it were all alone, I'd probably give it a miss - life is too short to waste on boring Bad Movies,
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment