An auteur zombie flick (or are they vampires?), Messiah of Evil is beautiful to gaze upon. So many shots would make for a great poster on your wall, with co-directors Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz frequently using painted pop art to flatten the frame, trapping you in their creepy fantasy. Following a young woman as she journeys to a small town in search of her father, the film\u2019s blueprint is fairly run-of-the-mill and the duel voiceover work that comes in and out will infuriate filmgoers who find that kind of thing to be lazy writing. The highlights are undeniably when supporting characters break free from the pack and find themselves hunted by the zombified townspeople. The movie theatre scene in particular is one of those great horror moments when the savage villains take their time when terrorizing the victim for no explicit purpose other than it works cinematically. In moments like these, Messiah of Evil does original things within its familiar outline.
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\u201CA reality is just what we tell each other it is,\u201D says book editor Linda Styles (Julie Carmen). \u201CSane and insane could easily switch places, if the insane were to become the majority. You would find yourself locked in a padded cell, wondering what happened to the world.\u201D This is the crux of John Carpenter\u2019s In The Mouth of Madness. Loads of films play with the concept of what\u2019s real, but few signpost their themes so obviously. I mean, the plot centres around the disappearance of a fiction writer, while Sam Neill\u2019s protagonist is an insurance fraud investigator, a profession where you must test what\u2019s real all the time. Despite big ambitions on paper, the movie pitches up somewhere between a pulpy horror novel and, when Neill makes it to the mysterious town Hobb\u2019s End, an old point-and-click adventure game as he makes his way around the location, interacting with locals, witnessing an increasingly bizarre chain of events. The lack of clarity on what is the true nature of reality might frustrate you if you take In The Mouth of Madness too seriously, but the journey is full of interesting notions.
Conquest is the kind of movie you throw on towards the end of a session for all the bugged-out beatniks still hanging around your living room\u2014the kind of movie that when those blurry-eyed viewers wake up, they question whether this crazy thing they\u2019d witnessed was actually some mad hallucination. A Golden Axe-style high fantasy, Conquest follows young warrior Ilias, who leaves his people to embark on a rites of passage journey into a strange, barren land. Pursued by a sorceress who suffers visions of being slayed by him, Ilias links up with nomadic warrior Mace, from which point the plot can be summarised by Mace\u2019s assertion that the pair will simply journey \u201Cwherever our feet carry us.\u201D Legendary horror director Lucio Fulci offers no explanations or apologies for this fantasy world, where wookie-esque creatures feed on human brains and flesh, where water zombies surface, where dolphins are a man\u2019s best friend, where a battle-hardened outlaw like Mace can look a bit like Fabio. The whole movie is the proverbial banquet for the eyes and ears. Yet I found the harshness of the world to be strangely moving. Fulci\u2019s universe feels so vast, so bleak. You can walk anywhere but nowhere. Feels strangely apt for these times.
Futuristic action movies tend to set in the thick smog of a dystopian hell. Demolition Man invites you to consider whether there\u2019s something worse than that: a faux-utopian nanny state. There\u2019s a magic to the way the movie drops two muscle bound SOBs from a chaotic past\u2014Snipes\u2019 Simon Phoenix and Sylvester Stallone\u2019s John Spartan\u2014into a future world of no crime and perfect manners is executed to perfection. Sandra Bullock and Benjamin Bratt\u2019s sunny disposition sells the universe; Snipes goes so far over the top as the almost Looney Toons-giddy psychopath, almost every single line is a quotable (and I do quote them all the time). Then there is Stallone. So rarely has Sly been given the chance to emulate his great rival Schwarzenegger\u2019s more humorous brand of action performance. Here, he finds the appropriate light touch as the only sane person in a huge asylum, using his character\u2019s disbelief at what the future has become to sell gag after gag. Marco Brambilla fuses together all his elements into a perfect piece of popcorn entertainment. Maybe it\u2019s all he had to give to Hollywood. Brambilla hasn\u2019t made another major movie before or since.
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