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It begins most abstrusely, a wide shot of a university building tilts down to a flaming anthill, a cloudy eclipse segues into a church fountain, behind it a trio of priests unlock a chest and produce a key. As with Big Trouble in Little China, Victor Wong is at hand to elucidate the method: "Say goodbye to classical reality," and the arcane welter starts taking on an air of Vampyr. Expanded worldviews comprise the theme, just science and religion working together over the weekend while Satan knocks on the door. Immemorial evil is the swirling green matter at the bottom of a California catacomb, candles surround a cylinder that drips upwards into a ceiling pool à la Cocteau. Father Loomis (Donald Pleasence) and physics students (Jameson Parker, Lisa Blount, Dennis Dun, Susan Blanchard) scramble to sort things out, "philosophers, not scientists" in dilapidated Saint Godard's, supernovas on the telly and other undecipherable texts. "I've got a message for you, and you're not going to like it." John Carpenter has Frost's Armageddon in "Fire and Ice" at his fingertips, a remarkable metaphysical vortex. Alice Cooper in undead-kabuki makeup, the envoy that crumbles into a pile of creepy-crawlies, the possessed fellow warbling "Amazing Grace" before spearing his own jugular, indelible stanzas in a gruesome poem. Dante according to Tom and Jerry makes for a characteristic jest rhymed in ancient figures on computer monitors, "writing upon writing." When quantum theoretics can accommodate apocalyptic mysticism, a priest can compound his faith with an axe. Nothing like it, Franju's Nuits Rouges possibly, a severed limb or two for the Orphée mirror. Carpenter saves for the end the ultimate vision of collective spiritual unrest, the shared nightmare of grainy video as "a remote camera view of the future." With Anne Marie Howard, Ann Yen, Ken Wright, Jessie Lawrence Ferguson, Dirk Blocker, Peter Jason, and Robert Grasmere.
--- Fernando F. Croce |