Messiah of Evil (Full Film with Text Introduction)

The problem again and again with doing this site, as I’ve complained about at length on here lately, is that it tends to be only reviews of the more extreme kinds of horror films- Human Centipede 2, The Bunny Game, A Serbian Film, Men Behind the Sun- films that deal with torture, snuff films, rape- that get   many hits. As such I am forced to write on those to keep the audience expanding.  I did in all honesty enjoy many of those films, but it is frustrating that that must become the focus in order to keep the readership numbers high.  A film like Messiah of Evil is a good example of why I find this all very stifling. Even when it comes to horror cinema as the central topic, an extreme horror film like The Bunny Game of Human Centipede 2 does not represent by any stretch of the imagination the full scope of engaging horror films.  I kind of like this film Messiah of Evil from the 70’s that I saw last night at the Sci-Fi center in Vegas. No, this film only has flesh eating zombies, it does not involve prolonged sexual torture, rape and impregnation of human woman by aliens or monsters, or snuff films in anyway.  It was never banned in any country.  Messiah of Evil is like a zombie movie made by people on seven hits of acid or something.  I’d never heard of it but apparently a lot of people view it as a kind of a lost classic.  A good example of one such individual is Brad Jones “the Cinema Snob” (whose snuff-flick themed movie Cheap I reviewed on here).  Brad Jones has the whole shtick that he never likes anything, but he loves Messiah of Evil.  The general plot synopsis is a woman who has lost contact with her father, a painter- (and the paintings of his shown in the film are all tripped out, of course) goes to a small town in Northern California, where she meets up with some weird traveling bohemian types.  Her father’s notes suggest that something very bad is happening in this town, and then, you guessed it- flesh eating zombies.  There’s a kind of Antichrist figure that appears, as the title would suggest, but he’s a weird old west Antichrist, an Anti-Joseph Smith almost- it involves the Donner Party.  The film also includes some very nice early electronic soundtrack work akin to the soundtrack work of Can or Goblin from the same time period.  This film is more the sort of thing that I myself am into, weird zombie films from the 70’s and the like- but unfortunately on-line audiences seem focused on digging up images of sexual violation.   That is truly a shame in my book.