Loving direct to video horror is like loving democracy – you love it in spite of the fact that it’s a fucking mess. One treasures the opening up of access; the unpredictability of the form and content; and the sheer defiance of the powers that be. And yet, all too often, the access is squandered; the ideas are as pathetic as the execution; and the cop-in-the-head replaces the one at head office.
In structural terms, the highly decentralized 80s boom in VHS rentals was in many ways a godsend. It meant that the tiniest film might reach equally tiny markets in critical mass, resulting in a genuine potential for surprise and discovery at every small town convenience store. Some filmmakers took full advantage of this access: having fulfilled their generic obligations, they proceeded to fill things out with startlingly unmediated threads of social commentary, human insight, or sheer glorious excess.
Christopher and Linda Lewis’s Blood Cult is, emphatically and indisputably, NOT one of those works.
Blood Cult aims to smuggle nothing into your living room except the product itself. It knows and fulfills the basic conventions of slasher movie spectacle, and when it’s not running down those conventions then it is running down the clock. It has not got one single idea in its head. Its rote banality is actually fascinating; so thin it’s elemental, so transparent it enhances the view.
The tape bills itself proudly as “the first movie ever made for the home video market”. At the behest of Tulsa’s United Home Video, Christopher directs and Linda produces, following a truly wretched script by one Stuart Rosenthal. And indeed, the venture proved wildly successful: produced for $27,000 in 1985, Blood Cult grossed over a million bucks, thus blazing the trail for all that followed (including…but let’s not get ahead of ourselves).
Hitting the ground running, the film begins with not one, not two, but three murders, in two sequences comprising the first fifteen minutes of the movie. No plot, no characters, no motivation; two of the three victims are actually asleep. The killer, meanwhile, is basically a hand or at best an arm wielding a very large and shiny meat cleaver (the latter gets star billing on the box). The second murder happens off screen; that victim’s severed head is actually used to quite efficiently bludgeon the third victim to death! This is a high point.
The precise, storyboarded framing of these sequences is undermined by what’s going on in the frame – I don’t think the stilted lifelessness of every gesture and shriek is inspired by Robert Bresson. But the Lewises are obviously smart enough to lead with strength; by the next scene – when Sheriff Charles Ellis arrives at the murder scene to find medical examiner Josef Hardt playing around with the severed head – there must have been some disaster in script or sound because all dialogue is buried under Ellis’s procedural voiceover. He basically tells us outright that Hardt is the secret villain thus saving us some work. And in the next scene, an endless ‘get-it-over-with’ wide shot frames his labored and barely audible banter with daughter Juli Andelman – intended to be snappy, their winking repartee gets increasingly icky and Oedipal as the film progresses.
By now this Betacam production’s horror atmosphere is rapidly giving way to an insurance infomercial vibe, and this creative tension pervades the rest of the film. The monumental plainness of the leads skews things further toward Norwich Union territory, but it’s also kind of endearing. No movie stars here: Andelman’s got a double chin and housewife perm, and Ellis’s momentous white quiff is even more Tulsa-specific than hipster boyfriend James Vance’s greasy center-part and Arto Lindsay glasses. Together they chat up their quite reasonable theory that the murders are the work of a revived 18th century cult of Caninus, who are bent on constructing a sacrificial ‘mannequin’ from various human donors, the better to rule the world. This is inferred from the maniac’s calling card, a piece-of-shit dog’s head amulet that looks like it has been chiseled into a piece of chocolate gelt with an awl.
The bulk of the movie from here alternates ‘investigation’ – chatty encounters with the dean, the deputy, a farmer’s wife – with more hack-ripping around campus. The dialogue has its moments – the dean offers that “we do not need serial murders on this campus”, while the deputy unearths some muttered intelligence about a plot to resurrect Peter Lorre – but all recedes in the wake of the big show-stopper, namely of course the cafeteria scene with the severed fingers in the salad. This occasions some exceptionally lacklustre damsel-in-distress screaming from female customers and employees, which is engaging enough to distract from the obvious question: how the hell did the fingers get in the salad? And what was the Blood Cult doing chopping off fingers anyway, when they had already acquired a whole arm?
When the GORE stops making sense, you know you’re in trouble. And indeed we are, as around this time the film starts to careen downward into utter incomprehensible nonsense. I know logic is not exactly the slasher genre’s ace in the hole, but internal logic is everything, and this film’s third act is so packed with non-sequiturs that it leaves your tongue lolling and makes your bunions ache. Bear with me as I run this down.
The eternally short-staffed Ellis (how’s he gonna run for state senate when he can’t even bully town council into a budget increase?) decides to let the hipster boyfriend tag along for an investigation into suspicious Blood-Cult-like activities in Bennie Lee McGowan’s backlot, but not before some Cult-symp waitress slips a roofie in his coffee – where the hell did that come from? As a result, the zonked Ellis falls asleep on stakeout, so hipster boy trots out to the woods alone (so much for ‘backup’) and soon runs back yelling at the top of his lungs (not recommended stakeout practice). They split up again out in the woods, and after a bonk on the head Ellis either witnesses or hallucinates a Caninus party where his medical examiner is the MC and the guest of honor is…his daughter! After the minions unveil a half-assembled corpse collage, Andelman proclaims her duty “to complete the sacrifice…provide the body”.
Later as he’s nursing his concussion in the hospital, Andelman quite helpfully tells him exactly where she’s going to be that night, so that he can bust in and find her hacking the hipster with the iconic cleaver – so it wasn’t a hallucination after all, what a surprise. She says she did it to help convince him to join the cult too, so he can get ahead in politics.
Uh huh. At this point you would really like to know exactly when this woman fell in with the Caninus crew; if she was in on it all along, what was her motive in filling dad in on the whole history of the cult? And if she was newly inducted, where when and how did it occur? Also she purports to have ‘completed the sacrifice’ even though the requisitioned torso has not been delivered to her cohorts, a grave oversight indeed.
Somewhere between interior and exterior shots she turns from glassy-eyed zombie to blubbering idiot, and as Ellis chases her up the fire escape he doesn’t exactly display a sheriff’s prowess in high stakes negotiation: “You weren’t brought up to do things like this…your mother wouldn’t approve…it’s not my fault she died!” Then she jumps, bounces off a dumpster, and Ellis collapses in grief. The end…or, IS it, as a final truck in on Andelman reveals her to be still kind of twitching, thus leaving the door open to a sequel.
So. There still hasn’t been any damn ‘mannequin’ effigy; we still don’t know who the hell was hacking people up for the first two-thirds of the movie (whoever it was, they were a lot taller than Andelman…maybe it was the waitress), and a character we didn’t care about too much in the first place has undergone total motivation morph and is now almost dead but not really. Two fingers in a salad, a severed-head bludgeon, and a shock cut from a severed leg to a hamburger do not compensate for this kind of structural shortfall. The fascinating incompetence of the first scenes has given way to a deep cathode-tube-smashing impulse. The basic reaction is to try to put it behind you and get on with your life.
And then…as sure as money is green…the bastards actually do go and make another one! Revenge followed on in 1986, with an almost tenfold increase in budget, showing itself in cleaner 16mm cinematography and star turns by John Wayne’s son Patrick and a visibly frail John Carradine. This latter enabled them to hype this as “almost like a Stagecoach reunion!” – doubt that rang many bells with the target audience.
With the jump to 16mm, the analogy shifts from infomercial to movie-of-the-week, with no reduction in gore implied. The images are prettier and so are the gals, and they even spring for a half decent dog amulet this time. But money can’t buy you brains: learning nothing from their real mistakes, they still throw logic to the wind at every opportunity, this time working from a script by hipster Vance. While they spend great chunks of time rehashing plot points from the first movie, don’t pay too much attention because they alter details at will; for instance, Andelman is nowhere to be seen in spite of part one’s tease ending. The plot centres on a list of names the now-nutso Ellis apparently slipped his deputy, but that canny device flutters away before they’ve crossed two names out. There’s a dude on a dirt bike who keeps showing up – is he supposed to be scary or something? And after we spend the whole movie watching Wayne earnestly trying to solve the mystery, he duplicates the first movie’s fatal conceit by announcing himself as a cult conspirator at the very end, thus transforming Blood Cult’s dubiety into outright fraudulence; it doesn’t just make no sense, it is a frontal assault on the viewer’s intelligence. And we STILL don’t get to see the mannequin.
No complaints here about the beauty queen quotient, although the hot-tub murder succumbs to another attack of the stupids: not only does it cast the swim-team jock in the ‘waitress’ cameo-cultist-of-convenience role, but it breaks the very first rule of horror by framing the scene with cheat POV shots from the bushes. And the big-name stars are irritatingly pasted on; Carradine’s contribution to the office dialogue scene could have been shot in a different year on another continent in spite of the OTS shots, and Patrick looks stoic in the face of adversity where the amateurs look like they’re having a great time, even if it isn’t exactly contagious.
In fact, while both films suck by any human measure, viewed together they take on a different kind of fascination. Secondary characters from Blood Cult float Rosencrantz-like up the marquee in Revenge; people you didn’t pay much attention to are suddenly granted bonus backstory points, and the afterglow of commercial success results in more committed performances. In particular, Bennie Lee McGowan’s country gal rocks out here, putting more energy into her lines than any of the pros even though her entire role consists of variations on the line “Ain’t nobody gonna take my land!”
The moral: keep it in the community, cheapo-horror auteurs. The big boys may only be cashing a check, but put your upstairs neighbour in front of the camera and she’s gonna put out like she’s making world history. And don’t forget to partake in a bit of that enthusiasm yourself, Mr. Director – especially when you’re proofreading your script.
Originally published in Volume #1, Issue #22, “Cheap Horror Movies And Why We Love Them”.
JC Culp
JC Culp is a collage filmmaker and the founder of Unpopular Arts, which provides media production, preservation and presentation.