Blackout – 1985, Canada/US, 98m. Director: Douglas Hickox.
The Demon Lover – 1977, US, 74m. Director: Donald G. Jackson, Jerry Younkins.
Night Angel – 1990, US, 88m. Director: Dominique Othenin-Girard
Possession – 1981, France/West Germany, 124m. Director: Andrzej Zulawski.
BLACKOUT (1985) An amnesiac, disfigured in a car crash, undergoes several facial reconstructive surgeries and discovers his name is Allen Devlin. Devlin (Keith Carradine) begins romancing his friendly doctor (Kathleen Quinlan) and, in the following years, the two start a family. Suburban bliss turns sour, however, when Devlin is stalked by an obsessive cop (Richard Widmark) who believes Devlin might actually be a psychopath who brutally murdered his own family six years earlier. Despite being a made-for-television thriller, Blackout is taut stuff and predates the similar The Stepfather. Established British filmmaker Douglas Hickox (Theater of Blood) delivers a well-rounded mystery, which works mostly because of believable situations and likable characters—including Quinlan, who’s excellent. Recommended, if you can find it. B (Currently unavailable.)
THE DEMON LOVER (1977) A woman is summoned to a graveyard in the middle of the night, where she’s clawed to death by some sort of monster. Later on, a group of friends who follow a cultist named Laval (Christmas Robbins, resembling Robby Steinhardt of the band Kansas) question their leader’s motives when Laval instructs the women to disrobe and open their legs for the men. Seeking retribution, Laval performs a ritual which brings forth a demon to kill his ex-cult members. Baffled by the bizarre deaths, a homicide detective seeks help from a local occult expert (Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘s Gunner Hansen), who informs the cop of the sinister dealings of underground black magic practitioners like Laval. Since this information has been evident to the viewer from the get-go, all one can do is sit back and try to enjoy this obscure bargain-basement oddity made by people who probably saw Rosemary’s Baby on acid. Entertaining in spite of itself. Look for Howard the Duck co-creator Val Mayerik in a small role. C+ (Currently streaming via Tubi.)
NIGHT ANGEL (1990) Lilith—the Biblical Adam’s first wife and mistress to Satan, the subject of theologists and Jewish folklore scholars the world over, and the antagonist of so many films of the late eighties—had, by 1990, replaced the vampire as the modern horror movie’s femme fatale. In Night Angel, Lilith (Isa Andersen) crawls out of Hell to seduce and kill the mostly male staff of a highfalutin fashion magazine in order to take over the business. That’s small peanuts compared to world domination, but within the context of the movie’s shallow world of sex and glamour it works splendidly. As soon as Lilith gets into town, she fucks one of the magazine’s editors to death before slaughtering his family. This is followed by an unintentionally hilarious sequence where Lilith, in an attempt to woo the crowd, dances for a room of publishers. More people end up murdered as she engulfs the fashion community, including the magazine’s zombified owner, who walks into an elevator shaft and plummets to his death. Lilith doesn’t stop at just men—she turns the magazine’s sex-starved heiress (Karen Black) into a brain-dead guinea pig. Photos of Lilith circulate the office, turning the employees into homicidal horndogs. Supplied by K.N.B. EFX, the makeup and other special effects are first-rate—a prolonged hallucination features the hero (Linden Ashby) walking through a David Lynchian version of Hell amidst a sea of ghastly bodily mutations, including the ultimate pair of tits. When it comes to acting, the folks of Night Angel don’t dial it back—especially Anderson, who’s particularly unrestrained in the moaning department—but would we have it any other way? I certainly hope not! Unadulterated camp—not to be missed. B (Currently available on YouTube.)
POSSESSION (1981) Mark (Sam Neill) and Anna (Isabelle Adjani) are very unhappy. Married and with a young son, the couple do nothing but scream at each other—often for no particular reason other than because the script calls for it—and throw things around as if they’re living in a skit from the Muppet Show. Anna is having an affair, but upon confronting her lover, Mark discovers she cut it off months ago. This is because Anna’s new lover is big, slimy, and not human. A private detective, hired by Mark, is murdered by Anna after stumbling upon her secret—she keeps the beast in a grungy apartment where she feeds it the body parts of her victims. Possession is a movie that takes itself very seriously, which is amusing considering it’s nothing more than an overwrought rip-off of Cronenberg’s The Brood. Both Adjani and Neill overact, with the script failing to make either character sympathetic or the slightest bit interesting. It says something when the monster turns out to be the smartest character in the movie. But, maybe that was the point? A critical and commercial bomb that’s only recently received attention from the intelligentsia who praise its grotesque decadence. D– (Currently streaming on Kanopy.)