This little "gem" was part of a DVD 50 pack of cheesy exploitation movies that a friend gave me after learning of my predilection for z grade cinema, and I have to say that it is easily the worst movie in the collection, and by "worst" I mean "stupidest".
The movie can be reduced into 5 "threads", which I will attempt to summarize in descending order of quality:
1> Framing device #1, God vs Satan in a chess match as they discuss the fate of the characters in the three actual stories in the movie. This is extremely cheesy and turgid and pretentious, but these scenes are far and away the "best" thing about this movie. The guy behind the beard as "God" is decent (if predictable), and the other guy has a certain sleazy, jolly air, and they have mildly amusing (if, again predictable) conversations that introduce and conclude the three tales. There are also two "night porters" stalking around who deliver their lines with a certain dignity, but they have a total of 2 minutes of screen time, so I'll ignore them. In fact, I think that the two different actors were actually supposed to be the SAME character, but someone wasn't available for the later shots. That's typical of the level of "craft" in this movie.
2> Then a frozen-faced John Philip Law and the guy who plays "Bull" on "Night Court" appear in a straightforwardly sleazy tale of evil doctors running an insane asylum. We're maybe 4 minutes into the story before the first naked woman strapped to a gurney appears, and gagged, topless women strapped to gurneys make regular appearances every few minutes after that (each appearance is brief, because they are then cut up -off screen- for body parts and dissection models for "medical schools".) The sleaze and shock pile on so thick and fast here that it's all rather bemusing. The final "payoff" is straight out of an EC comic, and the segment is over almost before you know it. In fact, it doesn't really have an "ending" as such - but it does finish with a bang. It's incredibly awful, but it has a lot of energy, and I've always liked Law for his performance in "Diabolik", so I hope this role helped him make a condo payment or something.
3> A half-baked ripoff of "The Omen". Cameron Mitchell is in here somewhere as a detective trying to solve a mystery with occult elements in it, and there's a saintly surgeon whose destiny intertwines with the Son of Satan. Sometimes in a movie like this you can just tell that no one involved with a screenplay believed a word of it, but everyone just soldiers on and tries to keep from visibly throwing up while on camera. This one is notable for an unintentionally hilarious final showdown in a surgical unit where a nurse sticks her face in the Anti-Christ's chest wound and is possessed and transformed into him. (What??) But what really distinguishes this as an utter dog are the claymation sequences where the forces of evil attack. They wouldn't pass muster in a "Gumby" episode. The acting here is actually decent and appropriate to the subject matter, but the screenplay and effect just defy description.
4> The stupidest of the three tales appears to be a drunk 8th-grade Metallica fan's rip-off of "The Pit And The Pendulum". The "star" here is an actor named Rick Barnes, who I swear I've seen elsewhere, but never in a stink-bomb of this caliber. Like Law, he appears to have had Botox injected into his face, and he plays a "medical student" who has more free time on his hands than any medical student in the history of the world. He gets involved with a member of an eeeeevil "Death Club". (No seriously, that's what they call it) in a battle of wills over the affections of a "porn star". Every scene appears to have been scripted, directed, acted and shot under the influence of Quaaludes, nothing in a given scene seems to follow from anything else, and there's an off screen narrator intoning goofy explanations that makes things even worse.And while the other two tales at least pretend they have an actual ending, this one just stops, as if it were a Roadrunner cartoon.
5> Finally, the absolute worst element of the movie is the 2nd framing device (that's how messed up this movie is, they couldn't decide which framing device to use) appears to be someone's attempt to combine a "Loverboy" music video with "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", or maybe it's supposed to be a transvestite cabaret revue and they couldn't get the rights to a Sondheim tune so they had to make up their own libretto.
Listen, I'm a pleasant person by nature, really I am. And some part of me understands that the director just put a bunch of kids in front of a camera and had them screw around and pretend to be in a music video. But watching the results makes me want to drown them all in a pit of molten lead. Sometimes I feel merciful and change my mind and decide to use boiling offal instead. This is possibly the worst misfire of talent and staging since someone let Gene Deitch take over the Tom and Jerry cartoons, and in fact I'd rather watch any of those cartoon abortions a dozen times before I'd watch this crappy series of faux-outrageous camping for the camera again. All by itself, this sequence drags the movie down to a "1".
This was an astonishingly inept exercise in padding, editing and generally wrong-headed artistic direction. You have to be an devotee of cinematic dreck to enjoy this on any level. Hell, I love Z grade movies for what they are, and this one left me gaping in astonishment.
The movie can be reduced into 5 "threads", which I will attempt to summarize in descending order of quality:
1> Framing device #1, God vs Satan in a chess match as they discuss the fate of the characters in the three actual stories in the movie. This is extremely cheesy and turgid and pretentious, but these scenes are far and away the "best" thing about this movie. The guy behind the beard as "God" is decent (if predictable), and the other guy has a certain sleazy, jolly air, and they have mildly amusing (if, again predictable) conversations that introduce and conclude the three tales. There are also two "night porters" stalking around who deliver their lines with a certain dignity, but they have a total of 2 minutes of screen time, so I'll ignore them. In fact, I think that the two different actors were actually supposed to be the SAME character, but someone wasn't available for the later shots. That's typical of the level of "craft" in this movie.
2> Then a frozen-faced John Philip Law and the guy who plays "Bull" on "Night Court" appear in a straightforwardly sleazy tale of evil doctors running an insane asylum. We're maybe 4 minutes into the story before the first naked woman strapped to a gurney appears, and gagged, topless women strapped to gurneys make regular appearances every few minutes after that (each appearance is brief, because they are then cut up -off screen- for body parts and dissection models for "medical schools".) The sleaze and shock pile on so thick and fast here that it's all rather bemusing. The final "payoff" is straight out of an EC comic, and the segment is over almost before you know it. In fact, it doesn't really have an "ending" as such - but it does finish with a bang. It's incredibly awful, but it has a lot of energy, and I've always liked Law for his performance in "Diabolik", so I hope this role helped him make a condo payment or something.
3> A half-baked ripoff of "The Omen". Cameron Mitchell is in here somewhere as a detective trying to solve a mystery with occult elements in it, and there's a saintly surgeon whose destiny intertwines with the Son of Satan. Sometimes in a movie like this you can just tell that no one involved with a screenplay believed a word of it, but everyone just soldiers on and tries to keep from visibly throwing up while on camera. This one is notable for an unintentionally hilarious final showdown in a surgical unit where a nurse sticks her face in the Anti-Christ's chest wound and is possessed and transformed into him. (What??) But what really distinguishes this as an utter dog are the claymation sequences where the forces of evil attack. They wouldn't pass muster in a "Gumby" episode. The acting here is actually decent and appropriate to the subject matter, but the screenplay and effect just defy description.
4> The stupidest of the three tales appears to be a drunk 8th-grade Metallica fan's rip-off of "The Pit And The Pendulum". The "star" here is an actor named Rick Barnes, who I swear I've seen elsewhere, but never in a stink-bomb of this caliber. Like Law, he appears to have had Botox injected into his face, and he plays a "medical student" who has more free time on his hands than any medical student in the history of the world. He gets involved with a member of an eeeeevil "Death Club". (No seriously, that's what they call it) in a battle of wills over the affections of a "porn star". Every scene appears to have been scripted, directed, acted and shot under the influence of Quaaludes, nothing in a given scene seems to follow from anything else, and there's an off screen narrator intoning goofy explanations that makes things even worse.And while the other two tales at least pretend they have an actual ending, this one just stops, as if it were a Roadrunner cartoon.
5> Finally, the absolute worst element of the movie is the 2nd framing device (that's how messed up this movie is, they couldn't decide which framing device to use) appears to be someone's attempt to combine a "Loverboy" music video with "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", or maybe it's supposed to be a transvestite cabaret revue and they couldn't get the rights to a Sondheim tune so they had to make up their own libretto.
Listen, I'm a pleasant person by nature, really I am. And some part of me understands that the director just put a bunch of kids in front of a camera and had them screw around and pretend to be in a music video. But watching the results makes me want to drown them all in a pit of molten lead. Sometimes I feel merciful and change my mind and decide to use boiling offal instead. This is possibly the worst misfire of talent and staging since someone let Gene Deitch take over the Tom and Jerry cartoons, and in fact I'd rather watch any of those cartoon abortions a dozen times before I'd watch this crappy series of faux-outrageous camping for the camera again. All by itself, this sequence drags the movie down to a "1".
This was an astonishingly inept exercise in padding, editing and generally wrong-headed artistic direction. You have to be an devotee of cinematic dreck to enjoy this on any level. Hell, I love Z grade movies for what they are, and this one left me gaping in astonishment.