- Directed by Brian Yuzna
- Written by Woody Keith
- Starring
- Clint Howard
- Neith Hunter
- Tommy Hinckley
- Reggie Bannister
You know, I’ve got a feminist pagan friend who would utterly despise this movie, for reasons above and beyond those for which I despise it.
I got that sinking feeling during the opening credits; music by Richard Band (brother to Charles); production manager Gary Schmoeller, who’s made a career of producing losers like Albert Pyun’s turkeys. These, I felt, were inauspicious beginnings.
On the other hand, Reggie Bannister showed his face in the first five minutes, so that helped mitigate the evil omens.
The basic premise (if one could find one) is that Kim, a wanna-be reporter, follows up on a spontaneous combustion case that leads her to an odd trio of Lilith-worshippers, and then a lot of stuff happens that makes absolutely no sense, and then the closing credits roll.
The problem is, Brian Yuzna (director and co-scriptwriter) stuffed this movie so full of allusions and oblique references that a) they conflicted with each other and became a horrifying mishmash, and b) there wasn’t enough time to get to such matters as, I don’t know, plot and consistent characterization.
To start with, this was not a Christmas horror movie; it was a movie with a couple of references to Christmas in it. Even the goddess-worshippers made only one passing reference to the solstice. There’s no reason this couldn’t have been set at any other time of year — or, like most movies made in LA, at no particular time of year, and I could change that by editing about 20 seconds out of the final product.
Yuzna kept trying to set up the conflict between goddess-worship and the patriarchy — the publisher’s blatant chauvinism, Kim’s conversation with her boyfriend’s sexist father about “the proper place of women” according to the account of Adam and Eve, etc. And then he kept trying to add subtle things (I suppose to counteract the hordes of Kafka-sized bugs that supposedly follow Lilith, goddess of all creeping things), so subtle that they were pointless. To wit: The three worshippers = the three aspects of the goddess. The publisher’s name was Eli, a dig at El or Elohim, the patriarchal god of Judaeo-Christianity. The men fight each other for the woman with a broomstick (it could only have been more phallic if it had a couple of golf balls stapled to one end), and poor challenged Ricky shows up to help with the initiation wearing a big penis face-mask. And all this added up to… I waited and waited, but Yuzna seemed content to just scatter crumbs of implied meaning throughout the film.
My pagan friend would scream out loud at the portrayal of goddess-worship. Now, I know horror movies make a tradition out of warping religion, and that works fine with major, well-known religions like Catholicism because we all know that, outside of the movies, your friendly neighborhood priest is unlikely to be a secret demon-summoner or werewolf or serial killer. But giving a completely warped depiction of a religion that gets enough negative, ignorant press as it is, without even mentioning, “By the way, this isn’t the way real pagans act” — I just think it’s irresponsible and bigoted.
For instance, here are a couple of the things my friend Jennifer would point out (if I could ever manage to get her to watch the entire movie without throwing up her hands in disgust):
- Goddess-worshippers are not anti-men, any more than mainstream Judaeo-Christians are all misogynists.
- Drugging someone to initiate them is about as realistic as having pagan rituals presided over by an archbishop and Bob the Clown. The entire idea of pagan initiation is a self-dedication; you can’t be forced into worship in a religion without any ecumenical structure, canon, or proscribed methods of worship.
I’d like to believe that sometime during post-production, Yuzna blinked, rubbed his eyes, and said, “Whoa — what was I thinking?” A pity he didn’t come to his senses much, much sooner.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 5
- breasts: 8
- explosions: 0
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- dream sequences: 1
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 4
- Clint Howard (“Ricky”) was the little alien genius kid in the original episode “The Corbomite Maneuver” and also showed up on DS9
- Tommy Hinkley (“Hank”) was a journalist on the bridge of the Enterprise B in Star Trek: Generations
- Ben Slack (“Gus”) was on an episode of TNG
- Marjean Holden (“Jane”) appeared on DS9
