SpecialsTarget Disturbing yet enthralling

ScoobyMint Disappointment for a huge fan!

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Roxie The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

jarretyoung123 This film technically isn't completely a zombie film but a mystery, it's a true look into a nightmare and is by far the greatest hidden gem of the seventies if you ask me. A young woman named Arletty enters the sea side town of point Dune searching for her father, but she unexpectedly enters a nightmare fueled hell for she has Arrived on the 100th anniversary of the arrival of the dark stranger, a priest who came with intentions of spreading his new order. But The anniversary is nothing to be celebrated for the moon, blood red, has turned the whole town into zombies. Arletty along with the suspicious threesome, must solve the mystery of point dune and escape, before they too are changed.This film ends fairly ambiguous with the viewer wondering if the events ever even happened, no loose ends are tied by the end of the film but it's fairly obvious that this was done on purpose to give the film a more mysterious feel. This is truly a strange film and it has to be one of the best paced films I have ever found. Truly a one of a kind I could not recommend enough.

melvelvit-1 Screenwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz took time off from "American Graffiti" to make MESSIAH OF EVIL, an art film in every sense of the term. Narrated by a woman confined to an insane asylum, the film opens with her warning "They say nightmares are dreams perverted..." as she proceeds via flashback to relate how and why she came to be locked away. Arletty (eternal starlet Marianna Hill, nee Marianna Schwarzkopf, cousin to the general) travels up the California coast to an isolated seaside town in search of her artist father and teams up with a well-dressed hippie (Michael Greer) and his two groupies (exotic Anitra Ford & spacey Joy Bang) to unravel the cryptic diary she finds in her dad's abandoned beach house. The walls are bizarre paintings that blend '70s pop art with Edward Hopper-style imagery and the film soon becomes a nightmarish fever dream indistinguishable from that artwork. The apocalyptic "mystery" involves a malediction dating back to the Donner party and doesn't make much sense but so what -the ladies are lovely and the set piece slaying's sure unsettling in this quasi- surreal, one-of-a-kind film, the closest Hollywood ever came to fantastical Eurotrash in the early 1970s. Elisha Cook, Jr as a town drunk who talks too much and Royal Dano as Arletty's missing dad make the most of their screen time and Joy Bang attends a midnight screening of what would prove to be the prophetic KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE with coming attractions showing Sammy Davis Jr & James Caan in GONE WITH THE WEST, a film not released until 1975. The MESSIAH's become a cult classic that actually lives up to that appellation.

Roman James Hoffman 'Messiah of Evil' is a relatively unknown B-Movie horror curio from the Seventies. A woman goes to a small seaside town to look for her artist father after he mysteriously stops correspondence with her and finds that something is well and truly afoot in the town. From the off the film establishes a disjointed atmosphere which is accentuated when she teams up with a man and two (stunning) women involved in a bizarre three-way relationship and together they try to fathom just what the dickens is going on in this creepy town. From here they learn that the town has become (for reasons unknown) a flesh-eating zombie cult.On the surface the movie appears to have little in the way of characterisation or plot, but any gaps in these qualities only serve to highlight the lingering oddness that pervades the film which reminded me strongly of the distanced dream-like quality of Herk Harvey's B-movie classic 'Carnival of Souls' (1962) and, to a lesser extent, Argento's 'Suspiria' (1977)…if the hysteric flailing of Argento's classic had been given a sedative, that is. This effect is achieved through the locale of the town itself, the fine cinematography, the use of voice-overs, and the music all working effectively to build suspense as the eeriness unfolds climaxing in some genuinely surreal and haunting scenes.However, it must be said that while I found the surreal world created for me easy to step into and inhabit I can easily see how fans of conventional horror would be put off by the creeping pace and absence of anything tangibly horrific. Still, it's the kind of movie that lives happily with its "cult" tag and sits comfortably among the late-night schedules which it knows all-too-well how to haunt.**************************Public domain movie. Watch it free here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIuUyNwq9T8

MartinHafer In the history of film, there was perhaps no actress with a worse stage name than Joy Bang. Now had she been a porn star, the name would have been a boon, but in films like "Dead People" and "Play It Again, Sam", this moniker was less than helpful in forwarding Ms. Bang's career! Perhaps she should have thought of some other pseudonym...ANY other pseudonym! The film begins with Mariana Hill playing a young lady who arrives in a creepy town. She is looking for her father--a famous artist. No one seems to know where he is--and all this is accompanied by VERY creepy music and acting. While for a long time NOTHING really spooky occurs, the film makers manage to still make a film that makes you on edge.The lady soon meets up with a SUPER-bizarre group of weirdos--a rather bohemian man (Michael Greer) and his two ditsy and even weirder female companions (one of which is Ms. Bang--playing the more annoying of the two playmates). Inexplicably, she invites the trio to stay the night at her home--though they just exude strangeness and I can't see any sane person asking them to spend the night! Again, nothing bad has occurred--but there is an undercurrent of foreboding. I was quite surprised when I soon saw that these four were among the most NORMAL folks in this entire hellish town. Why and what was happening in this town is just something you need to see for yourself.The film is just inundated with one sick and twisted vignette after another. The albino man is particularly strange, though I also have no desire to EVER go to a Ralph's grocery store after seeing this film'...and the movie theater will never be the same after seeing "Dead People"! You just have to see what I mean in this incredibly odd and very, very atmospheric tale. Like another horror film of the same period, "Suspiria", the film is permeated with a sense of dread though what exactly this is all about is quite vague until near the end. And, like this other film (as well as "Carnival of Souls" and "Night of the Living Dead"), they do a lot in setting a mood with an incredibly small budget.The bottom line is that this film is immensely scary, stylish and unsettling. Despite its very humble pedigree, the film is very, very effective and is a wonderful example of inexpensive cult horror.