SATAN'S CHILDREN

d. Joe Wiezycki (1975)

Rape revenge films are always mean and tawdry: no matter how satisfying the revenge element is, there always has to be a disturbing attack to set up the story. Here, there's a slight twist on standard exploitation mores: the victim is a teenage boy, a runaway from an intolerable home life who meets an older guy who he hopes will be a friend and mentor but instead turns out to be  the scumbag leader of a gang of scumbag abusers. The scumbags all take a turn with the unfortunate youngster then dump his ripped and torn body in the middle of nowhere, where he is discovered, semi-conscious, by a group of satanists. How lucky can one boy be?

The satanists are all young, hippy-ish and in the thrall of a super louche smoothie called Simon, who gives orders in a slow, quiet voice whilst fiddling with his Zapata moustache. He talks of The Master as if he were the area manager. It's a ridiculously tough group – disciplinary infractions are punished by execution by hanging or, if they're being generous, by burying you up to your neck in sand and covering your hair in syrup to attract the ants.

Strangely for an unconventional cult of sexual freedom and social anarchy they are dead set against homosexuality to the extent that poor Bobby, even as a rape victim, is treated with suspicion and labelled a 'loser' who was 'weak' enough to 'let' himself be abused.

The only way Bobby can prove himself is in the bloodiest terms possible. He escapes, pushes two of the pursuing Satanists into quicksand (actually a hole filled with plaster of paris and washing up liquid), goes home, hits his mean Dad over the head with a bottle and bundles his wicked stepsister into the boot of his car before finding and shooting his attackers and cutting off their heads and putting them in a bag which he presents to Simon as proof of his sincerity, proving himself as a ‘winner’: a bright eyed boy with a bright arsed future. His stepsister (who is more unpleasant than plain evil) is handed over to the group as a kind of cult-warming present, to be tortured and, eventually, crucified.

It’s a remarkable film, really, despite clear technical limitations: the sound often overlaps or gets suddenly cut off; special effects and pyrotechnics are on show; several key scenes lose dramatic intensity by simply being too dark. The cast is made up entirely of students, which occasionally shows, but actually helps create a terrifying vision of a post-Manson USA where disaffected youths are being corrupted, abused, degraded and turned to the dark side all across the country without anyone knowing about it.

THE BELIEVER'S HEAVEN

d. Ron Ormond (1977)

I'm a tolerant person. I don't mind what other people do as long as it enhances their lives and doesn't fuck others over. I've never had a religion, and never missed the absence, but I am fascinated with the mechanics of belief and, particularly, the mechanism by which it is delivered. 

The Believers Heaven is pure propaganda, overseen by the director, Ron Ormond, a fringe film maker and writer who turned to God after surviving a plane crash, and Estus W. Pirkle, a fire and brimstone preacher with steel hair, stone eyes, an unwavering voice, an immobile face, and rigid ideals. Pirkle has two modes: angry and furious. He reserves his greatest ire for us, the viewer, staring at us down the camera, confronting and challenging us, baiting us about how we’re never going to get into his heaven with the sort of shitty attitudes he knows we possess.  

Pirkle talks without interruption and without discernible respiration. He is clearly learned in the sense of having read The Bible enough times to recite large chunks of it, but this does not wisdom make. In fact, it’s genuinely hard to get any sense of what he's actually saying, apart from a list of the various precious stones and other minerals that Heaven’s walls are apparently made of. 

Pirkle’s monologue is intercut with interviews with other ‘experts’, all cut from the same sack cloth, and all with the strange habit of darting out their tongue to lick their bottom lips like some sort of pontificating toad, presumably a trick of the preacher trade. These talking heads are further supplemented by DIY historical pageant recreations featuring tea towel head scarfs and a multitude of stick on beards. The acting is abysmal but then the material they have to work with is terrible – The Bible may hold all the answers, but it’s scant on detail and very poor on dialogue.

To bring it up to date, the film uses news footage of a recent earthquake in 'Central America' spliced with fake re-enactments of the disaster that are both in poor taste and very badly done. To give an example, there is a seemingly interminable shot of a burial trench filled with blacked / browned up corpses, one of which winces when another body is dropped onto her legs.

The overall message of this mad melange is that the afterlife is only available to the saved and, as Jesus could be back at any minute and the Rapture takes no prisoners, you’d better be saved or get saved right now. It's not enough to live a blameless life spent helping others, by the way, and it’s not enough to just believe, no matter how fervently, and to quietly worship in your own way – you must be saved, presumably by Estus W. Pirkle, and you have to tell everyone or it doesn’t count. 

The consequences of not doing so are laid out in merciless detail: you will join the liars, cheaters, criminals, Jews and Buddhists (!) in Hell, a place which resembles a burning landfill site populated by people with sad, dirty faces wandering around moaning about how utterly miserable and wrong they are and how they should have listened while they were still alive. Oh, and this goes on forever.

The film is fun for a while in a stiff, arch, totally ridiculous way, but the oxen cart wheels finally come off when it introduces a 32 inch tall woman who is lifted onto a table and sings with almost unbearable sincerity about how she will be whole in the afterlife and won’t need a wheelchair anymore, and three badly burned teenagers, looking utterly broken, who sing half-heartedly while clutching a hymn book in their melted, fingerless hands. Unsurprisingly, this breaks the campy spell immediately and permanently and only serves to underline what a terrible confidence trick it all is.

MANSON

d. Laurence Merrick / Robert Hendrickson (1973)

I actually first watched this a few weeks before Charles Manson died, so maybe I inadvertently dialled up the cosmos and reminded it that Manson was still around and needn’t be.  I don't feel bad, by the way, Manson was a nuisance, and never did anything good for anybody, least of all himself.

This well-made documentary, which benefits from archive footage made by The Manson Family themselves, was released two years after the longest trial in American history, a fraught, complex thing in which a man was convicted of heinous crimes which he encouraged but took no physical part in. Manson was the ultimate bad influence, a lifelong criminal and misfit who collected hippies and runaway kids and brainwashed them into becoming a nihilistic death cult using sex, drugs and endless rambling monologues / lectures about race wars, societal breakdown and how Hollywood needed to pay for ignoring his musical genius.*

If you were wondering how Manson, a short, scruffy bloke with anger issues (a bit like Hitler) managed to keep at least thirty people under his thrall, ultimately getting them to kill for him, just watch  the interview footage with some of the fringe Family members, the ones that didn’t murder anyone and drifted away from the core soon after. One of the guys tells a rambling and obviously untrue story about how he talked to squirrels and rabbits in the desert while his audience, a gang of barefoot, snaggle toothed long hairs, none older than 25, sit agape, occasionally guffawing with raucous laughter. They are either cretins who genuinely find this bullshit interesting and funny, or they’re too scared to show that they’re not hip enough to be in on the joke. Chemicals play a part, of course, but there’s also an active disavowal of intelligence, a suspension of disbelief and critical faculties in order to be part of something, to be included, to belong. For someone like Manson, 'a Venus Flytrap amongst the flower children', they were easy pickings.

We also see the girls Manson left behind, those fizzing with resentment at not being in jail but still worshipping at their guru’s feet. They pontificate and philosophise, posturing with weapons and acting tough. One of them, Squeaky Fromme, gives us a lecture about how you should know every part of your weapon intimately as she struggles to pull her knife out of its scabbard. In 1975, Fromme tried to shoot President Ford, but her gun didn’t go off.  

Cannily, the film makers withhold Manson's voice from us until the very end. When he speaks, you hear exactly where his acolytes have got their opinions, their attitudes, their words, even their intonations, cadences and pronunciations. Yes, he is charismatic, not least because he is deeply unusual and utterly self-possessed, but I don’t feel like I want to carve the word ‘pig’ on anyone’s stomach for him. Perhaps I need more drugs. Send more drugs. 

* There is a persistent rumour that Manson auditioned for The Monkees. He was actually in prison at the time. I don’t think he’d have got the job, anyway, they already had Davy Jones.

A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

d. Donald W. Thompson (1972)

There's no time to change your mind / 

                        The Son has come and you've been left behind...

I’m not a religious person (far too cynical), but I am fascinated by the odd and occasionally disturbing things people of faith so fervently believe in. A classic example  is The Rapture, which is the subject of A Thief In The Night, the first of four Evangelical films made in the 70s and 80s that examine this phenomena in unprecedented detail.

As you may know (and if you read this), The Rapture is the moment when true believers (dead and living) will be raised into the heavens to join Jesus Christ. This is usually interpreted as an instantaneous event, i.e. one moment they will be there, the next they will be gone, forever. In typical style, true believers are those are only those who have accepted Jesus Christ as their personal saviour, and nobody else, no matter how much they believe in God or how nice they are will be accepted. It's the Christian church,  the selection criteria is not kindness, but compliance. This miracle will, of course, cause widespread social unrest, and will lead to the formation of a fascistic world government who will brand the remaining population with 666. Jesus will then come back to save the day, but it will mean the end of the world. There, now you know as much as I do.

This film, which is carefully and professionally presented, has lots of great moments: a fairground conversion to religion; a cobra snake attack; the realisation that loved ones have vanished; sinister broadcasts from the head of the emergency world government, The Imperium; a look at the stuffy bureaucracy of fascism; a helicopter chase, and a dream within a dream framework that almost manages to avoid cliché. Astonishingly, it is claimed that this film has been seen by 300 million people across the world – and it’s really, really weird. Result!

My favourite part of the film is its opening, in which an amateur band of teenagers sing Larry Norman’s song about The Rapture, I Wish We’d All Been Ready (later covered by Cliff Richard). It’s very earnest and intense, occasionally off key and sets the scene perfectly for the madness to come.