SHE NEVER SLEPT reviews the film MESSIAH OF EVIL - a film I probably should have heard of

 

Willard Huyck’s Messiah of Evil is one of a legion of elusive genre films from the 1960s and 70s that have cropped up for decades on bootleg and public domain videotapes mastered from source tapes often ravaged by scratches, splices, and colour so oversaturated it bled like an opened vein. Blood Sabbath, Bury Me An Angel and Oliver Stone’s Seizure spring readily to mind as examples; all now exist looking exactly the same – un-restored and badly duped – except on DVD, instead of VHS. These ragged transfers had been duped and pan and scanned to the point that the film print often appeared on the verge of disintegration. As with all holy grails of psychotronic cinema, fans wanting to see the film as intended prior to the era of the DVD plunked down exorbitant change for Huyck’s flick in cropped and pan and scanned VHS tapes and, later, DVD...

 

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