The Abomination (1986), by Bret McCormick

SPOOKYWEEN HAS BEGUN!! I hope you're ready to get messy--with the gross and gory myriad mouths of THE ABOMINATION!

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Black Devil Doll from Hell (1984), by Chester Novell Turner

Black Devil Doll from Hell opens with this proclamation: "We all have our personal horror stories to tell. May yours never be as devastating as Miss Helen Black's." I'm glad that director Chester Novell Turner decided to include this expression of sentiment. Because now, I dread the day where I find an antique shop that sells a ventriloquist doll which will not only molest me, but call me a bitch over and over again, until I am driven mad. Verily, there is no worse fate on this Earth, save for perhaps enduring an existence without Black Devil Doll from Hell.

Helen Black is an ultra-Christian in a world of sin. Her friends call her up to brag about their gangbangs, and she runs into thieves selling stolen goods out of their car trunks on her walk back from church. She's sanctimonious and has a rather large stick up her ass, but many of her peers are just as bad. It's pretty great that her friends think they can talk about sex with her when she's told them time and time again about her beliefs on such things. Anyway, Helen eventually ends up at an antique shop where she is fascinated by a ventriloquist puppet. The store owner tells her it once belonged to an East Indian sorcerer, and it always finds its way back to the shop--she's sold it four times but it's returned one way or another every time. Helen decides to try her luck, bringing the doll home with her. Soon the doll comes to life and introduces her to the world of rape, consensual sex, and being called "bitch" every five seconds, all at the same time. These scenes are virtually indescribable because it's a woman being fucked by a puppet. When she wakes up she finds the puppet missing, and tries to replace him with flesh-and-blood men. This isn't the same, though, and she eventually remembers that the puppet always returns to the store. But you only get one try at puppet dick, because when she re-purchases the doll and tries to make it fuck her, its eyes light up and she dies from what appears to be brain hemorrhage. Fin.

This movie is upsetting on basically every level. Not only is about puppet-rape and its transformation into puppet-lust, presented as an apparent consequence for religious devotion, but aesthetically and directorially it is also a sensory mess. Scenes end too late, music comes in too earlier. The stylishly awful Casio just sort of barges in with no cares about appropriateness or dialogue mixing. For example, when the antique store owner is giving Helen the doll's backstory, a high-pitched squeal immediately breaks in and starts muting the dialogue through pure aural force. Characters will start talking but a lack of union between the cuts and cues fill their lines with unnatural pauses. And, if you want to see the "ultimate VHS movie" that's still visible through its sea of fuzz, look no further. This is SOV as fuck, and it's a miracle.

Then of course there is the script. Helen puts nylons on the Black Devil Doll from Hell, saying, "These will make you just a shade darker...you'll look more real." She follows this up with, "These are the only eyes to ever see me NEKKID...until we're married." So, is she gonna marry the doll then? When the doll pops out to knock Helen unconscious, not only is he played by a child, but the soundtrack appears to consist of velociraptor noises taken from a nine-year time-portal opening up to a showing of Jurassic Park. It just gets better and better.

The rape scene is simultaneously disturbing and laughable. We get lines like "Now that you have smelled the foulness of my breath, you can know the sweetness of my tongue" and "Heeeeeere's Johnny!" The foul breath in question is represented by filling the dummy's mouth with dry ice. The actors also go all-out on making sex sounds, so it does sound like porn if you look away. But when you look back, it's a two-and-a-half foot tall puppet fucking a human woman. There is no preparation for this.

Somehow, the whole affair does manage to be a little boring at times, due to a large amount of padding, but this simple tale contains enough vomitous horror for everyone and anyone who can dare its cruel mysteries. Just be ready to get shocked to your soul.

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The Identical (2014), by Dustin Marcellino

*

This is one of those..."hint movies." They have the perpetual hint of trash about them, but they're consistently circling the trash drain, never quite dipping too deep down below the waters. Eventually, there is a moment of release--in many of these films, there are sometimes several such moments--but the whole affair feels too solid, too well-disguised, for the distinct traces be properly identifiable. My first true Christsploitation movie on the site (Noah didn't count) is The Identical, a movie about the story of Elvis with a Christian spin--and man, does it make some weird decisions.

Based loosely on the possibilities of the fact that Elvis Presley had a miscarried twin brother, we follow the Hemsleys, a Depression-era couple whose child turns out to be twins. They can take care of one child, but not the other, and so when William Hemsley goes to a tent sermon led by Reverend Wade, he hears the words "It is better to give than to receive" and takes them perhaps a bit too literally. You see, Mrs. Wade has miscarried multiple times and it seems unlikely that the Wades will ever have a child. This is going where you think it's going--yes, William wants to give one of the babies to the Reverend and his wife. His own wife resists as first but fortunately they resolve it offscreen, and little Dexter Hemsley becomes Ryan Wade. The Hemsleys hold a funeral for their child (...why?) and we cut away to instead follow Ryan Wade as he grows up. His father wants him to be a preacher, but Ryan is much more interested in music, particularly the nascent genre of rock and roll. His father continually punishes him for sneaking out to rock clubs (or "honky-tonks" as he calls them) and eventually makes him join the Army...hey, just like that Elvis guy! (Except Elvis was drafted, not pushed in by his dad.) Ryan eventually hears about rock legend Drexel "The Dream" Hemsley, who maintains the same level of fame in this universe as Elvis; after marrying his girlfriend Janey, Ryan decides to enter a Drexel Impersonator contest which the King himself is judging. He's so good that he gets a deal as "the Identical," a Drexel cover artist who gets paid as much as Drexel himself (!!!). Eventually however Drexel dies in a plane crash (just like Elvis?) and Ryan retires, aiming to make peace with himself and his father, as well as his birth family when he learns of them. He decides to return to music in the end, so that his brother's dream can live on.

This movie is actually pretty sweet, even though I don't share its religious values, and even though it twists history to do what it yearns to do. The acting is good, the sentiment seems real, the filmmakers obviously adore and respect Elvis, the direction is pretty solid, it's pretty-looking, and it actually lands quite a few of its jokes. Of course, I may speak from a position of relief that this movie is never truly uncomfortable (except for one possible moment explored below); still, Stockholm Syndrome is better than what I can usually hope for in a movie like this, so I'll take it.

That having been said. It's still a movie about an Elvis impersonator who is as successful as Elvis himself. It's still about a movie put in that situation by a couple faking their child's death to cover up a simple adoption situation. (Did they seriously think adoption wasn't a thing during the Depression?) It's still a movie where a husband tells his wife to her face, "Maybe we can just give up the one?" It's still a movie where the first dialogue that isn't narration is some incredibly jarring yelling. But that's not the full depth of it. For one thing...Elvis exists in this universe. I have seen this commented on by everyone who's ever reviewed it, but it bears repeating time and time again: Elvis Presley is mentioned to exist and have the same career as he did in real life in this universe. Meaning this is a movie about a hugely successful Elvis impersonator who is himself impersonating an Elvis impersonator. A single line that includes Elvis in this universe undoes the whole dynamic, but that's really only the biggest problem.

Janey is originally seeing someone else when she re-enters Ryan's life, working as a nurse. However, he keeps creeping on her, calling her from work over and over, and sending her flowers. Worse, he uses the fact that she accidentally revealed the identity of one of her patients--Drexel Hemsley's dying mother--to creep on, well, a stranger's mother, because when Ryan decides to creep into the room of the hospital where Janey works to see Mrs. Hemsley, he doesn't know they're related. He explains to her, "I'm a big fan of your son's music and I just wanted to offer you a little prayer," but if someone came into my hospital room when I was sleeping and that was their explanation I would say something along the lines of, "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!" Admittedly, the conclusion to this creepiness results in the pretty-funny scene where Ryan and his boss from the auto shop show up to serenade Janey, getting arrested in the process--he convinces her to get a single cup of coffee with him, and we Gilligan Cut from his arrest to their getting married. Again, this movie does do some things right.

It's interesting because while the movie insinuates that rock and roll was invented by two white guys playing black guys' instruments (actually, from a metaphorical statement, that's...well I mean the white guys don't steal the instruments in this case...), it takes a strong stand against traditional conservative authority. Reverend Wade's treatment of Ryan is shown to be, if not abusive, then sincerely troubling, for both of them, especially when it results in the elder man's heart attack. The movie seems to say that that old way of yelling at your kids, making them follow in your footsteps whether they want to or not, telling them to "be a man," shipping them off to the Army for misbehaving...that hurts both of them, and only in letting it go do the old priest and his son find peace. When the cop shows up to bust the "honky-tonk" that Ryan sings at (with the term itself being a racially-charged phrase), he says to the mostly-black crowd the place is "dark and stinky" and that it's full of "reefers and devil music." Ryan tells him there's nothing wrong with the people there and gets a punch to the gut. Racism and intolerance towards certain types of music are condemned just as surely as that '50s household lifestyle is. Where I was perhaps a bit uncomfortable was where the movie had a scene set during the Six-Day War which was likely intended as an analogy for a modern-day pro-Israel message. It feels out of place with the rest of the movie, but, chemical weapons aside, the scene is framed to be more of a pro-Judaism message, which I support (though I know that associating modern Israel with Judaism can be uncomfortable for some). For a Southern white church in the '60s to include a Menorah in their church and to declare foreign Jewish folk to be God's Chosen People seems pretty progressive to me. This is sort of a setup to when Ryan finds out later that Mrs. Hemsley was Jewish, making him Jewish as well--a fact which seems to delight him. For once, I feel I can presume innocence, and feel comfortable believing that this movie is just pro-Jewish, which is much-needed in movies in the 2010s.

I have so much difficulty digging into the strangeness of this movie, and why they might have done it the way they did. I'm glad that its quirks exist, though, and I can be distracted by such gems as the confirmation that Drexel Hemsley did in fact star in a series of increasingly-shitty beach movies before his untimely demise, just like his real-life counterpart (err...impersonatee?). I can notice little bits like the fact that Ryan's adopted mom never ages even while Pastor Wade shrivels into an old mummy. I can look forward to the bizarre Tarzan yodel Reverend Wade lets out when he finds out Ryan knows the truth about his parentage. Yes, this is a "bad movie." And, it's part of a genre which I normally otherwise find to be really upsetting. But it largely avoids offense and thus carries enough of that elusive hint, that seductive trashy odor, to make it a classic for me.

* Call me crazy, but I looked over my copy a few different times and for the life of me, I swear this movie has no title card. My DVD actually stopped working after my last look-through, and appears to have died permanently! That's why I've used the poster instead, which, incidentally, is from IMDB.

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Horror Express (1972), by Eugenio Martin

We're going to be doing two train movies over the next two weeks, and if you've been keeping up on things here on the A-List, you can guess what the second one is going to be. For now, we'll be covering Horror Express, a legendarily bizarre Spanish-British sci-fi movie starring Hammer greats Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Forever full of unexpected twists, Horror Express brings more than just star power to the table, and while it somehow manages to be boring at times, it's definitely not something horror fans will want to pass on.

In 1906, Dr. Saxton (Lee) is transporting some very precious cargo back to England from Tibet--the frozen mummy of a 2 million year old proto-human creature which may have ties to the yeti. He is irritated by the presence of an old colleague of his, Dr. Wells (Cushing), who is overly curious about the nature of his finding. Before boarding the Transiberian Express, he is additionally irritated by a priest, who tells him his cargo is of the Devil--a statement somewhat easy to believe, given the dead man with the turned-white pupils found mysteriously at the perimeter of the crate; similarly, the priest is unable to draw a cross on the crate with chalk. Saxton, being Christopher Lee, dismisses all of this as rubbish and poppycock and soon he, Wells, and the yeti are aboard the train. Wells eventually pays a porter (VICTOR ISRAEL!!!) to peer inside the crate, but little does he knows that doing so will awaken the yeti's demonic presence. It slowly transpires that the "yeti" was merely the host body for something ancient...and alien. Indeed, by gazing into the retinal images of the dead yeti (in invocation of optography, my favorite pseudoscience) they determine that whatever was wearing the yeti was an extraterrestrial presence left behind on Earth 2 million years prior. All that time, this creature has been waiting for a chance to escape--and it doesn't care who it has to possess or slaughter to leave Earth.

Though there are suggestions of the supernatural--or rather, the super-scientific, for one can assume the alien's powers of possession are merely an evolutionary quirk of its race rather than an employment of magic--from the get-go, I seriously went into this just expecting a yeti-on-a-train movie. That in itself would be pretty fascinating, especially with Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Victor Israel, and (though I did not mention him in the synopsis) Telly Savalas in tow. Savalas plays a ruthless Russian cossack who boards the train to investigate the deaths, and mostly ends up manhandling the passengers until he learns too late about the alien. Without the alien, however, this movie probably wouldn't end up in A-List territory. For without the alien, we would not have the climax where Christopher Lee fights off an army of zombies, a feat which he probably never replicated.

I really cannot understate how much subverted expectations help this movie. Even in small ways. I bet you'd never see a movie made in Franco's Spain starring the leads of the infamously-conservative Hammer Horror franchises suggest that there are powers which God Himself can't save us from. The question of faith is a big one in this movie and it is never entirely answered--merely explored. I feel it sort of works better that way, raising chicken-or-egg questions on the nature of mythology. Does the alien resemble a demon because it actually comes from Hell, or is it that ancient humans were inspired to create tales of demonic beings because of encounters with the creature? I've always enjoyed stories like this, and that it tells such a story with a light touch is definitely a high point.

The alien also invokes another expected trope when it tries to convince its human enemies that if they let it live, it will use its superior knowledge to get rid of hunger and disease. It's a trick, of course, and we don't even know if that's something the alien can do. But even if it can't, it's a testament to the alien's psychology that it employs this trick. It has learned to be a demon--and demons tempt people. That's how they get you.

Again, the movie does manage to drag in places, but originality is a mighty queen. Horror Express constantly innovates and deconstructs its own ideas while never coming across as silly or ass-pull-y for such. Alien invasion movies set in the early 1900s are rare anyway, so it's totally worth it to check out this one.

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The Nightmare Never Ends (1980), by Phillip Marshak, Tom McGowan, and Greg Tallas

Ah, yes. With this, we move one step closer to getting to review Night Train to Terror, the greatest anthology film of all time and "sequel" to Gretta. You know how much I love Gretta and this one is a worthy prequel to this little fucked-up series that Night Train of Terror forces them all into.

James and Claire Hansen have only a small shortage of troubles in their life. James has fallen under criticism for the publication of his anti-religion book, God is Dead, and Claire has begun having strange nightmares of "devils and demons." When she goes to see a stage psychic in Vegas, he unlocks visions of Nazi Germany. Around this time, police lieutenant Sterne (Cameron Mitchell) begins having trouble with an elderly Holocaust survivor named Abraham Weiss, who is insistent that a 20-something rich socialite named Olivier is one of the Nazis who killed his family during the War, despite the fact that he's decades too young. Soon Claire and Sterne meet in the middle and begin to find out that they are wrestling with Satan himself. And Satan has his eyes on James Hansen, whom he believes is the perfect vessel for killing God once and for all.

I wrote that introduction based entirely off my memories for this movie, hopeful that it would live up to my expectations. Sure enough, the mental note I tagged to this film--"As weird as if not weirder than Gretta"--turned out to be accurate. The two films are similar but I don't yet know if there was ever any connection between them. Both of them have the same brand of horrible editing and odd cardboard acting that only '80s can provide. Claire in particular is horrible and as such she makes a very strange choice for a protagonist. But then, I've followed movies that featured Chesty Morgan as a protagonist and they turned out okay. The woman playing Claire isn't nearly as bad an actress as Chesty Morgan, but she comes close at times.

The Nazi angle is really jarring in this. To put things in perspective, we have no hints of Nazism until the psychic tells Claire to flash back to her dreams. Then suddenly: "SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL! SIEG HEIL!" and we're in the middle of SS Girls all of a sudden! Okay, I should specify that we aren't literally transported to the footage of SS Girls, but it's a party straight out of that film, sans the loads of nudity. The movie manages to handle the Nazi material well, clearly borrowing from Boys from Brazil and Marathon Man in places as far as the Nazi-hunting goes, but once we learn demons are involved, the Nazis are reduced to just being a cog in the wheel. The paranormal elements are also jarring but not quite as much--but still, you wouldn't expect a movie about Nazis and psychic dreams to suddenly feature a fucking xenomorph, would you?

I think this movie may be an anti-atheist film but I'm not sure. We're probably meant to be on Claire the Catholic's side as she spars with her husband over his rejection of religion. However, James' atheism is so ridiculous that it almost seems to be a parody. No serious atheist would use the disproof of Jesus as a historical figure as their sole evidence that all world religions are objectively bullshit--especially when said "disproof" is shockingly lazy! However, his atheism is still used for an intriguing purpose. After all, Olivier and his demons recruit James on the premise that his atheism is a pretense for Satanism. But James doesn't believe in the devil any more than he believes in God, leading to a scene where Olivier becomes something of an Inquisitor in the Christian sense, ordering James to repent his disbelief in Satan! In the end his refusal doesn't save him, however.

It's strange, too, because in this universe belief in God won't save you either. I was left with the impression at the end that this is a godless universe, or has become one, meaning the bad guys win. That's '80s horror for yuh.

The Nightmare Never Ends labors under the prospect that it really means something, or at least it gives the impression of such labor. For that reason, I think it's worthy of multiple viewings, and I know I'll return to it again and again over my life, if nothing else because the rubber monsters in it are amazing. And now that this is taken care of, we can move on to the series finale, with Night Train to Terror. This movie is already pretty weird, but imagine it now with most of its insides cut out!

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Book Club of Desolation #19: Left Behind (1995), by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

Disclaimer: If you are a person whose beliefs generally align with the views put forward in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind series--i.e. you are a premillenialist dispensationalist Evangelical Christian--you probably will not want to read this review. If you are a fan of their prose I recommend similar caution. This is because whether you find such an action justifiable on my behalf or not, I am about to, as the expression sometimes goes, rip this book a new one.

And before I continue with this next entry in our Bookvember adventure, I want to give a secondary disclaimer to those of you who don't buy into the Left Behind mythos: I don't have anything against mainstream Christianity. While I have my own beliefs and I will confess that those beliefs sometimes rub up against Christianity, I recognize that typical Christian beliefs in the United States are relatively non-toxic. I write this with the recognition that there's no avoiding discomfort in a review such as this--but I really do have to share my opinions on this book, for the reaction it elicited in me.

Left Behind, for those of you unaware, is a series telling the tale of those "left behind" to face the Great Tribulation after the Rapture takes the forgiven to Heaven. In a general sense, the first book establishes the premise of the series while introducing our principle characters. There are the members of what will be called the Tribulation Force (a league of faithful Antichrist-fighters), and their allies: we focus primarily on adulterer pilot Rayford Steele and a reporter named Cam "Buck" Williams. There is a plot about how in the early days of the Rapture, an Israeli scientist named Chaim Rosenzweig figured out to fertilize desert sands without irrigation; for this, Israel suffered a massive assault from post-Soviet Russia, wherein not a single person was killed, apparently by the hand of God. In the wake of the Rapture the social order has developed further from this, moving towards a UN-led one-world government under the command of charismatic young Romanian politician Nicolae Carpathia. Carpathia--if you couldn't tell from the name--is the Antichrist, and our heroes of the Tribulation Force slowly uncover the conspiracy he's set in place to ensure the rise of his dominion.

Here's the thing about Left Behind: it is not an inherently bad idea. There is a lot of mileage to be gotten out of a Rapture story--perhaps because of the Left Behind series, there has been an embrace of the idea in pop culture, regardless of the degree of religious intent in its presentation. Both as a secular and religious idea, Left Behind has potential. If you want to tell a more secularized version of the story, you'd have your basic Post-Apocalyptic model, with some potential for fantasy exploration--you could pit your characters against demons, for example. You could keep it ambiguous if it's the Biblical End-of-the-World or just an event that resembles such. And if you wanted to tell it as a story meant to convert people to Christianity, that could work just as well! Christianity guiding principle is ostensibly salvation, and so even if it jiggles the rules on the Apocalypse a little bit--have a story where our heroes are saved by their actions in the face of their final test! Left Behind thinks it's telling the latter story (and I'm sure at least some of the heroes go to Heaven in the end), but like a lot of works by Evangelicals, where it chooses to put its focus is where it becomes a thing of malice rather than mercy.

The issue with any sort of Rapture story is that the idea of a Rapture is inherently exclusionary. Typically, the estimates on the total of souls allowed into God's Kingdom by Rapture-believers represent a distinct minority of the human race. This usually contrasts the pop culture depiction of the Rapture wherein enough people are gone that society as we know it has collapsed. That was what I was expecting in Left Behind--cities on fire, planes crashing to the ground, power outages, cats and dogs living together...mass hysteria. Instead, the basic economy stays intact, airlines stay open, there is comparatively little social strife en masse...almost implying that few people were taken to Heaven in the end. And we do get specifics on who was taken, and who wasn't.

To begin with, all fetuses are taken to Heaven. This is a prelude to the scene wherein we learn about the abortion clinics who encourage people to get pregnant and have abortions just so they can stay in business. And the people who get pregnant and abort just for fun. I've already opened enough Pandora's Boxes, so I'm not going to go much further with this thread, but if the authors actually believe these clinics and people exist, that is absolutely repugnant of them. At best, they are emotionally manipulative; and frankly, folks, I'm just tired of all this hand-wringing hate against women who just don't want or can't have children.

Then there is the telling passage where we are learning about how babies and children almost universally vanished. That is a bit more bearable to me because it's less emotionally manipulative; then they say "even a few teenagers" were Raptured. That's some pretty telling phrasing there. Whether it's the opinion of the character saying that or the voice of the authors speaking through them, someone in the equation believes all but a few teenagers are so corrupt that they deserve eternal torture. I could dig my grave even deeper by wondering why any of these people deserve eternal torture for things like adultery or looking at porn (or "magazines which fed my lust," as the milquetoast prose would have it), but the more I tried to avoid looking for stereotypical opinions in the book, the more I found them. Of course the two old white Evangelicals writing about the Apocalypse believe that once puberty hits you you're worthy of damnation. Why would adolescent mistakes be forgiven by an all-benevolent deity, amirite?

I also don't really need to say that the book is racist, but when you've got a whole lot of celebration over Jews converting to spread the word of Christ, it's a little hard to avoid. Similarly, a lot of attention is drawn to the fact that the Antichrist is Romanian. Fiction is a slippery thing, in that it doesn't always represent the heart and soul of the creator, but if you do something too many times it's going to seem like a telling statement. I don't entirely know why LaHaye and Jenkins think Eastern Europeans are so sinister but it gets draining quickly.

Really, that's my issue with Left Behind: I went into it expecting better. The series is probably the most famous line of distinctly-genred "Christian fiction" books I know, and consequently, I was expecting something milder, more optimistic. And more convincing, because if Christian fiction is truly Christian it won't merely be entertaining. This sort of fiction should be convincing people to join up with what the authors (think they) practice, but instead it frames such a choice as one motivated by fear and exclusion. What is more is that, like a lot of the movies we've seen hitting theaters recently, it attempts to preemptively dismiss those who disagree with its view. This is not inherently an unsound argument strategy--you can toss out an opposing argument before it's aired, but it depends on how much you strawman your opposition, and how expertly you expose the irrelevance of such opposition. Near the end, the characters dismiss moderate Christians and their refusal to focus on the real problems of judging drug-users, abortion-havers, and porn-readers simply because the authors make them dismiss such people. After all, people, this is the Antichrist on the line, people!

Let's talk about this Antichrist. Nicolae Carpathia. What frustrates me is that that name is almost genius. He sounds like a fucking Doc Savage villain, and in a melodramatic, over-the-top pulpy atmosphere a character with that name could be used brilliantly. But this is meant to instead be a "subtle" tip-off that the head of the UN is the Son of Satan himself. The more I read that name the more I felt like the authors thought I was an idiot--that I couldn't figure out this guy was the Antichrist unless his name was some equivalent of "Damien Draculaston." I suspect from a certain point of view they do view their readers as not overly clever; that's why we're informed that Carpathia's enemies are heroic (i.e. masculine) via the fact that they have names like Rayford Steele, Buck Williams, Dirk Burton, and of course, Steve Plank. Maybe it's, yknow, "Plawnck," like the scientist, but if they mean like a plank of wood then it sounds like something Mike and the Bots would have called Reb Brown during Space Mutiny. If I can carry this tangent further, I have to comment on the fact that Rayford Steele's loved ones call him not "Ray" but "Rafe." "Rayford" is bad enough, but what could compel a writer to pen a series featuring a man named "Rafe Steele" as the protagonist?

Returning, though, to Carpathia--no, his name was not the only beef I had with him. Repetitious padding is what comprises most of Left Behind, but you will get so tired of hearing how Carpathia is handsome, famous, charming, the Sexiest Man Alive (which gets played up a huge deal), and 33 years old. Yes, I get it, he's 33 because that's how old Jesus was when he died--now I officially never want to read the words "33 years old" ever again. Then, the authors describe him on several occasions as "blond Robert Redford." NO. That is dishonest writing. If your fallback for physically describing your character is to compare them to a celebrity, you need another draft at best. Carpathia is set up to be charismatic because, as per the Christian tradition, he is a honey-not-vinegar sort of Antichrist, so nice and likable and talented that no one ever criticizes him, which is definitely an accurate and realistic view of humanity. We totally have people and things in our culture which are never criticized by anybody, right? In choosing this approach for him as a character, the authors make him come across as obviously evil--literally too good to be true. We humans wouldn't react to a man like him with adoration: we'd ask what he's selling.

Of course, another (possibly) unintended effect is that the book seems to encourage suspicion of those who bring peace and innovation. People have applied the idea of a charismatic and likable Antichrist to real figures all throughout history--"Of course Obama created a health care system which benefited millions! Giving you what you want is how the Devil hooks yeh." The message seems to be that political allegiances between nations, like the UN, are steps towards an order which will be easy for the Antichrist to rule. Consequently, it also warns us of figures in power bearing messages of pacifism. Admittedly, there have been real dictators who have abused our desire for peace to unleash terrible war--whether it's tricking us into thinking a war will bring peace or lying about their intent until their power is secured. But I've seen that fear used as an excuse to fight vague threats--somehow the presence of a supposed Antichrist induces moral corruption, but the definition of "corruption" and how it manifests often seems as vague and nebulous as the present definition of "political correctness." You get people believing that literally every politician is the Spawn of Satan and then you get people voted in who are going to make sure there's no education system to tell them otherwise. But I digress.

Eos, bring the dawn; Athena, heal my brain. Left Behind was disappointingly paranoid, misogynist, and boring. If you love reading books where the same details are repeated until they become meaningless, this may be your book. Christians deserve better fiction than this, in terms of both theme and writing quality. Dodge it like it'll burn you--and don't let yourself settle for this!

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Image Source: Wikipedia

Satan's Black Wedding (1975), by Nick Millard

Nick Millard returns again! This is probably his best film. It feels the most like an actual movie, even moreso than the already-impressive Criminally Insane. From here, Millard's cinematic output becomes no less amazing, but decidedly cheaper--and while Satan's Black Wedding does run into cheap territory at times, it is a wonderfully atmospheric vampire film that rivets you down for a vastly entertaining 60 minutes.

Hollywood actor Mark Gray has been called back to his hometown of Monterey after the untimely death of his sister Nina. The circumstances of her death are rather mysterious--she apparently committed suicide, but all the blood was removed from her body post-mortem, and her finger was cut off. Interrogating his sick aunt, Mark learns that Nina started going back to the abandoned church that they both feared as children, to ostensibly research a book she was writing on "High Satanic Rites." Similarly, the local police detective says that her death was one of many such brutal fatalities afflicting the town--one of these victims had swatches of 200-year-old cloth gripped between their fingers, their face frozen in horror. We the audience already know by now that the local priest, Father Dakin, is a vampire...and so is Nina. Mark will have to fight hard to escape the bloody grip of Satan.

There's a lot that I can praise about Satan's Black Wedding. I haven't watched it as much as Criminally Insane, but I have probably seen it about two dozen times, so it's still up there in turns of ranked rewatches. First of all, let's talk about how it works as a horror film. There's plenty of creepy stuff here. The opening scenes set in the tomb definitely stand out, with Father Dakin whispering "Sanctus diabolis" from the darkness as Nina mutilates herself with a razor. The entire movie is wracked with an audio hiss that highlights "s"-sounds, which actually heightens the spookiness of these Latin whispers; cheapness comes to the rescue. This follows our opening credits, which feature not only a freaky painting but some nicely atmospheric freaky music as well. Most of the movie's first twenty minutes, which set up the various facts of the world these vampires live in, are effectively mysterious, leaving us wanting to know more even though it's not really a mystery what's going on. And the scene where vampire!Nina slowly creeps into her aunt's bedroom is notable to me as well.

The acting, also, is generally pretty good. Nick Millard got someone to competently and convincingly cry on camera! That makes him better than a whole fucking lot of big-name Hollywood directors. I can't think of anyone who does a shit job per se, aside from maybe Mark's aunt's housekeeper, who has to give an extremely phony/racist Latina accent. It may not be great, but there is one performer in particular who I have to give a shout-out to: Ray Myles, who plays Father Dakin. Maybe someday I'll do a Ray Myles appreciation essay. He shows up in a lot of Millard's other movies, and has some bit parts in movies like The Amorous Adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (two titles which just roll off your tongue). I want to know what acting school he went to, because his English accent is one of the most refined I've ever heard. He's a wonderful man to listen to, and an astoundingly controlled actor. Listening to him recite "Dies Irae" at the end sends shivers down my spine. He is too good, and more people should know about him.

Not everything is perfect, but what movie is? The vampires' teeth look incredibly silly, mostly because they also include bottom teeth, giving the impression that they have tusks, or perhaps hillbilly teeth, rather than fangs. Plus, Mark is a moron for not immediately realizing that Dakin is a Satanic vampire--clergymen typically don't get happily excited when recounting the victories of the Devil. So there's a little bit of Idiot Ball play at work here in the script, which is never good. And finally, there's a scene with a policeman who was clearly spliced into the action much later, at a different shooting location. You'll know it when you see it--it's flagged by the fact that it will make you laugh your ass off. There's a very similar scene in Ed Wood's The Sinister Urge, featuring the policeman "Kline" who makes a bizarrely pointless appearance via extra-locational splicing, which is a great moment in the MST3K episode for such. Was Millard homaging Wood? The world will never know!!!! (He wasn't.)

But the faults blend in well with the rest of this movie. Everything feels coherent and complete. This is a must-see for the Millard initiate, and indeed for Millard fans as well. It never hurts to burn an hour!

P.S. HAPPY 100 REVIEWS! (Not counting Retrospectives, otherwise we would have passed this 57 movies ago.) I don't think I coulda picked a better director to commemorate a hundred reviews with than Nick Millard. Plus, it bodes well that this was also the week I got to see Jungle Trap. Here's to a hundred more!

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The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), by Richard Stanley and John Frankenheimer

Let's just get this out of the way: yes, I'm once more cheating on the site by reviewing this big-budgeted star vehicle directed by people who have some rather impressive accomplishments under their belts. However: this adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau is considered to be one of the worst films ever made, in no small part to its legendarily troubled production. I knew bits and pieces of the story behind the creation of this film and that was why I sought it out to begin with--plus, there's always at least a little joy in examining movies that people consider to be the worst ever. Let's face it: the most famous "worst movies ever" are not actually the worst movies ever made, just the ones that are considered famously bad by mainstream audiences. Freddy Got Fingered, for example, is not nearly as bad as Night of Horror, Humongous, or any of the animated musicals based off of the Titanic story. I've determined for myself that sometimes mainstream audiences can be a little spoiled--while also constantly deserving better--and I think today's movie really speaks to that idea. The Island of Dr. Moreau is actually a very impressive effort even if it's definitely still harebrained enough to have pissed off a lot of critics back in '96.

We open on the lifeboat of diplomat Edward Douglas (David Thewlis, whom many of you know as Professor Lupin of Hogwarts), whose plane went down on his way to Asia to negotiate a peace settlement. It's mentioned briefly that the year is 2010, but this has almost no bearing on the story whatsoever. Douglas is witnessing his two fellow survivors, army folk by the looks of them, savagely beating each other to death over the last canteen of water. Soon he is alone when the two inevitably kill each other (with no small help from the opportunistic Douglas himself), their bloody bodies vanishing beneath the waves to be eaten by the sharks. A delirious Douglas is eventually rescued by an apparent drug-addict and self-described veterinarian named Montgomery, played by Val Kilmer. Douglas is to go with Montgomery to the island of his employer, a scientist named Moreau.

Upon arriving on the island, Douglas meets Aissa, a stunning young woman who claims to be the doctor's daughter. Her presence helps bring Douglas a sense of peace, but it will not last long. When he inevitably goes poking around in the night, Douglas learns the secret of the island in the most gruesome way possible when he finds a bunch of doctors helping some kind of humanoid deer-creature gives birth to its braying, horrifying offspring. When he flees the situation worsens, as he finds himself surrounded by dozens by disfigured creatures that are seemingly half-man, half-animal. And indeed they are exactly that. As you may expect, Moreau (soon revealed to be played by Marlon Brando in a performance I cannot adequately summarize) is the man responsible, and Douglas has his chance to meet Moreau the next morning, when the scientist rides up in his draped palanquin, his skin obscured by thick white robes and a garish amount of sunblock. At dinner, Moreau introduces Douglas to his "children," including the exceedingly polite Azazello, made from a dog, and Majai, a diminutive creature made from God-knows-what who resembles something like a severely premature fetus who lived. Moreau has made his creations from splicing human genes into animals, but they must be controlled with a device called "the Pain" which administers electrical shocks to the beast-folk via implants--plus, they must be given drugs to prevent them from regressing back into their bestial forms.

The unstable peace of the island is finally broken when Montgomery and Douglas inform Moreau of a slaughtered rabbit carcass they found earlier. The beast-people live by a strict code of social etiquette called "the Law" which is another buffer against their reversion--one of the codes of the Law is "not to eat fish or flesh," so this is a sign that one of the beast-men is going rogue. This turns out to be a creature called Lomai, who is killed impulsively by Azazello at the trial Moreau holds for him. When Lomai's remains are cremated, a friend of his, a Hyena-Swine hybrid, discovers his implant and thus the source of the Pain. He removes his implant and forms a small gang who does the same. It won't be long before the questions Moreau refused to answer for his children catch up with him, and change the dynamic of who is a man, an animal, or a god in this place.

I think I've now seen basically every version of Island of Dr. Moreau that there is. The 1977 adaptation was passable, the 1933 Island of Lost Souls is a minor masterpiece of great '30s actors, and the 1921 silent German adaptation is a racist pile of feces. Plus there are movies like Terror is a Man and The Twilight People which, while not featuring a Dr. Moreau specifically by name, use the same general character types and situations as H.G. Wells' original 1896 novel. Wells' book is one of the few pieces of Victorian lit from my childhood which can still give me chills to this day, and the general premise is one I'd like to play with in my own fiction someday. And I think that the film's original director Richard Stanley understood the concepts behind the novel extremely well (even arguably improving on some of them), and with some minor divergences in the presentation of the characters, this is a pretty pure adaptation on top of everything--it's certainly more loyal than Island of Lost Souls, which Wells himself lived to see and hate. So it should be said right away that I will have a bias, because I have a certain fondness for the story. What makes it my favorite adaptation of the novel exists within those divergences. So, what did Stanley and Frankenheimer do that made it different?

Well, let's start with the most obvious, and that's Dr. Moreau himself. Marlon Brando apparently wanted to channel much of his previous portrayal of Kurtz from Apocalypse Now in the formation of his Moreau character, and not without reason. Both of them are isolated eccentrics who live in quasi-inaccessible jungles, who are discovered by everyman protagonists who learn firsthand how deep their madness extends before the worlds they've made for themselves collapse. Both Kurtz and Moreau were once considered eminent in their respective fields, but have lost all sense of purpose and reason in a sea of ever-complicating horror. But at the same time, Kurtz did not take on attire which made him look like, as this Wold Newton article has it, "the Pillsbury dough boy wearing drapes." Nor did he affect a mincing what-if-Truman-Capote-was-English accent. What makes Moreau and Kurtz different is that Kurtz's madness is a product of the Vietnam War, whereas Moreau seems to have a lack of motivation. This was one of the most interesting things about the character to me.

In the scene where Douglas meets Moreau, he specifically asks him, "Why are you doing this?" And Moreau is clearly uncomfortable with the question--he changes the topic entirely, to make it about how he "just can't tolerate the sun." Later, at the dinner scene, he gives a deeper explanation, that infusing animals with human traits will create people who are freed from the "Satanic" faults of human psychology. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense, as what happens to the beast-people is exactly what you'd expect--they have gained enough humanity to walk, talk, and have manners, but they are still close enough to being animals that this creates an existential crisis for them. They have more psychological problems than the average person, and any idiot would know in advance that that was an inevitability. Moreau shows on several occasions, however, that he simply doesn't care--it's the end result of this work that matters, and if there are some fuck-ups in the prototyping he'll coo and purr them back into submission. One clue to the mystery arises in the summary of the Law, where one of the tenets not present in Wells' novel is "not to make love to more than one, or in any which way." So polyamory and homosexuality are apparently off the table entirely for the beast-folk. One could argue that in the case of the former, Moreau is trying to avoid the sort of socialization that animals like lions practice; a lot of animals are naturally polyamorous. But assuming that the "any which way" bit is meant to refer to homosexuality, then we can view Moreau in the context of a social purist, a person ruled by his intolerance of the imperfection of the people around him. This ties in with the film's theme of Christian dualism, "God vs. Satan," as it pertains to Moreau's role as a creator. Moreau thinks he can remake a flawed mankind anew, but no amount of science can give him that power. "He tampered in God's domain," as Ed Wood once put it, and as my MST3K-loving ass put it as the movie ended.

But I don't think the theme of the movie, as it is in other movies about God-domain tampering, is an anti-science one. I think it simply argues against perfectionism. The movie is all about flaws, and related to that, it's about chaos. Why else does beastman M'Ling read Yeats' "The Second Coming" at dinner? Moreau, as hypocritical and flawed as he is, is the lynchpin holding all of this together, and as in the book, his death means the end of social order on the island as a consequence of what he left for his "children." And here we're starting to get into what makes people think this movie is bad. After Marlon Brando leaves the movie, dismembered by his own beast-men, we lose our sense of narrative structure. I'm not the first critic to point this out. Things just sort of stop. We see Douglas trying to find a sample of the anti-regression serum for Aissa, and it takes way too long. We see Val Kilmer slowly go insane from stress and drugs, and this seems to linger unnecessarily. After the hour mark, you could cut out about twenty minutes of the forty which remain, and the movie would flow much better. But you'd still have to make something of the comparatively sloppy editing and continuity that ensues.

I think the real-world reason for this post-Brando chaos, where it seems to become an entirely different movie, is probably a result of Richard Stanley's scenes contrasting with John Frankenheimer's. A lazy, less art-inclined script might be accountable for moments like Kilmer's "I wanna go to Dog Heaven." But just for funsies, let's assume this was deliberate. Suddenly, the shift in editing, acting, and flow are a result of the absence of God. The Maker has been slain, and in his wake reigns disorder. Moreau almost gets posthumous vindication of his godhood in this, even if all of the shit that follows his death cascades out of all of the mistakes he made in his attempts to control the beast-folk society. One could almost see a pro-religion message in this, given that invariably the message at the end boils down to, "I wonder who the real animals are? Man? Or beast?" Have we, too, lost our God? Is that why we are dragged down into the Satanic flaws instilled in us in birth, which make us create the evils of this world?

I myself don't buy that that was what they were going for, because Richard Stanley has indicated that his outlook on life is considerably more mystical. In preparation for this review, I watched the 2014 documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau, which is a fascinating watch even if you don't end up doing anything at all with this movie. The older I get the more I love hearing production stories for movies, and it is my shame to admit that I take special interest in movies with bizarre or horrifying production stories. Island of Dr. Moreau was pretty fucked up, to say the least. How the movie metamorphosized from Stanley's artistic vision of mystic, universal questions to Frankenheimer's relatively commercial New Line product is like a goddamn drug trip. An apt metaphor, as psychedelic drugs were a big influence on Stanley's scripting and directing, alongside his beliefs in magic. For a movie based on the idea of post-theistic chaos to have a production as chaotic as the events depicted in it is one of those magical breaches between fiction and reality that I love looking through history for. Every so often we are hit with something that satisfies our desire to see patterns in everything reminds us that while life creates art, sometimes too does art create life. I don't recall if Stanley talks about this link directly in the documentary but I know his type well enough to feel that he was satisfied by this. Even with the trauma and career damage it brought to him.

The Island of Dr. Moreau is far from perfect. Some of the lines are horrible, the performances vary depending on at which point in the production the scene was filmed, there are some awful CGI monkeys, and its female lead doesn't really get to do anything but look pretty, flinch a lot, and eventually make embarrassingly dubbed-over cat noises. But it definitely deserves a better appraisal than what it's gotten over the years, so give it a try. And don't worry about the art. Just keep your eyes on Brando's insanely campy performance and all will be well.

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Noah (2014), by Darren Aronofsky

As they say: Now for something completely different.

I'm a critical latecomer to the rising trend of Christiansploitation. You may have noticed recently that theaters have been flooded by films like Miracles from Heaven, Do You Believe?, and War Room. Even if you're not familiar with the content, the trailers usually make no secret that they are religious films. The trailers have proven to be so formulaic, and the movies so prominent, that SNL has gotten up to imitating them and has done so with excellent accuracy. There are a fucking lot of these movies, and the craze will probably go on for at least a few more years.

These movies aren't the first of their kind--arguably, Christiansploitation (exploitation movies that usually have a Christian propaganda bend) is a genre as old as any form of exploitation. There have always been films that have proselytized in some way or another, most of them pretty harmlessly. These movies aren't quite movies in that they're a string of cliche sequences that are meant to appeal to established Christians while also ostensibly trying to pull at the heartstrings of the nonbeliever. They typically don't succeed in that latter goal, but if you like weepy soap opera tropes, you can still enjoy them from an exo-Christian perspective.

Some of these movies, however, decide to go that extra mile. The Fred Phelps sort of extra mile. War Room in particular stands out as a movie that perverts faith in that particular exploitation-y way. I haven't watched that one, but I did decide recently to expose myself to the Theater Experience of one of these movies.

So. I saw God's Not Dead 2. If you've been following the Christiansploitation scene at all...well. I'll leave your reactions to yourself. (They probably just involve calling me an idiot, which I understand.)

I won't talk about God's Not Dead 2 at length, and not because I want you to see this for yourself. Don't watch this movie. If you do, don't pay for it. Read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia or check out a direct review of it if you're that curious. Suffice it to say that it is both dumb and offensive in its misunderstanding of the American court system and in its paranoid, baseless climax. By watching God's Not Dead 2 in theaters, I have proven myself to be supremely irresponsible. There are other things I could have done with my time. Instead, I have given both time and money to a production group that has shown possession of a hateful and ignorant ideology. No, of course I don't mean religion or Christianity in general. God's Not Dead 2 is not a Christian movie. It's a movie created by bigots who, despite possessing privilege, have the audacity to claim they are victims of oppression by groups who are comparatively underprivileged.

As far as the actual Theater Experience goes--the only other person who attended beat us to the theater. He was a 20-something grad student who sighed a lot and texted through the whole movie. When we left the theater he was staring at the ground with the look of a man who wants to hang himself. His Internet must've been down for the day or something and this was the only other thing he could think of doing. Probably because he didn't have any wet paint lying around to watch dry.

Anyway, I'm being pretty self-indulgent here. We're here instead to talk about one of the weirder Christiansploitation movies--which, incidentally, happens to be one of the less preachy ones. In fact, this movie doesn't preach at all, and perhaps comes the closest to being a true Bible film in that involves a lot of strangeness and deeply unsettling graphic violence.

Indeed, I can best describe this movie as one of the Old Testament movies that Ned Flanders was making in that one Simpsons episode. And that's honestly probably why I'm featuring it on this site. Noah is very much a trash film, or very much like one. It's an overlooked genre film that is not afraid to fuck with its audience in its imagery. It did get a theatrical release, true, but how many people actually saw this? Or heard of it? What's that? It starred Russell Crowe and Emma Watson, and heavily featured Anthony Hopkins? Pffft. Trash films feature high-quality actors all the time. Usually not in starring roles, and usually not while they're still considered to be good--I'm thinking of John Carradine's trash flicks here--but...anyway. Point is, I thought I could get a good review of this movie. As such, I should actually discuss the plot of this fucking thing.

Admittedly, you probably already know the story--at least, the basic details of it. The film does make its own elaborations, but that's primarily because the Bible isn't particularly great at character arcs/development. We see the creation of the universe, following the Genesis passages, complete with weird psychedelic images, artsy snake motifs, and...Adam and Eve having golden-glowing skin (?). The main focus, sin, is established via the Original Sin and the Cain and Abel story. Make no mistake, this is a somber world, a world that's paying for its mistakes. Noah's father is killed by the mysterious degenerate known as Tubal-Cain, who will become the main source of pain for Noah's family for the rest of the movie. As Noah grows up he begins to have visions of the coming Flood, and slowly becomes obsessed with fulfilling God's will, which of course involves building the ark and saving the innocent beasts. However, as time goes on, he goes even further when he begins to see the flaws in his family, and he believes that God only wants them to deliver the animals while humanity goes extinct. This leads to one of the most emotionally draining sequences in the story, comprising much of the movie's second hour, which depicts the family's increasingly torturous life aboard the ark. Of course, there's a happy ending, but much of the film is dark, and, indeed, hard to interpret at times.

The movie is a fantasy film, and that is why it is great. It doesn't try to make the Bible work in real life. The film apparently takes place in some sort of weird proto-caveman era, though everyone looks like a modern human (we see at some point that the Earth has a single continent at this point in history)--plus, Emma Watson is on record as saying that the movie may be set in a post-apocalyptic future. Several of the creatures that evidently didn't make it to the ark are shown, and they include what appear to be ARMADILLO DRAGONS. There are also fucking golems in it. Basically, the golems are these Biblical creatures called Nephilim. Biblical scholars don't agree on what the Nephilim were, but in this movie, they're fallen angels who had stone accrete around their bodies when they crashed on Earth. They speak with Optimus Prime voices and jerk around like Harryhausen creations. Then there's Methusaleh, who lives in a swamp cave and helps Noah by giving him spiked spirit-quest tea. He's basically Yoda, if Yoda was played by Anthony Hopkins. And again. This is a Bible movie. I haven't seen many of them, but I'm pretty positive that rock golems, armadillo dragons, and cave sorcerers never show up in Passion of the Christ. For shame, Mr. Gibson. The movie also contains evolution, which you probably will not also see in a Christiansploitation film. We see bacteria become fish, fish become reptiles, reptiles become weasels, and weasels become humans. This movie really is supposed to take place in real life. While also being completely divorced from any sort of reality.

That this movie is a fantasy movie made me initially wonder if the film was actually rewritten to cash in on the Christiansploitation craze. But apparently, director Aronofsky has always wanted to make this movie. The fantasy oddity of the movie comes from the fact that Aronofsky, of course, also made Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan. If you don't feel like sitting down for two and a half hours, just envision a Noah's Ark movie as lensed through those two movies. You've got the characters tripping out, the relentlessly gloomy atmosphere, and of course, nightmarish levels of obsession. In regards to cash-ins, I do see some similarities to the Middle-earth movies, but I think that's due more to the influence those movies had on modern fantasy media.

The only fault that I'll give this movie is that another movie it shares elements with is 300. I don't like that Zack Snyder has left an impact on filmmaking--I hate literally everything he has done.* While fortunately Aronofsky doesn't mute the fuck out of his colors (in fact, the movie's colorfulness is one of the movie's prime highlights), he does have a lot of slow-mo. Slow-mo is dead. Or let it be dead. Please. I am probably just picking nits with that, but I hate being reminded of 300 in any form. Noah also happens to have the same grimness as 300, but the ending of Noah is uplifting rather than pointless. It moves in a positive direction but it is an Earn Your Happy Ending movie. Surprisingly, the ending does not involve Jesus. I like that. It enhances the thought that this is a Noah story, rather than the Noah story.

Okay. You got me. As I've been writing this I've been noticing that this movie was actually well received, and it did quite well at the box office. Today is the day, then, that the Mudman reviews a well-made mainstream movie. Whoops. But at least it's a weird one, and I will admit that I almost did a review for The Force Awakens. I had so many thoughts about that movie that I needed to get them out somewhere. But I slacked off on it and after a few weeks passed, I felt like I lost my window of relevance. As always, I want to share my love of the world through my writing, and so if I've encouraged you to have the experience of watching this movie and you enjoy it, this review has not failed. You deserve to be happy. Movies will make you happy.

Check out Noah if you want a look at religion as fantasy fiction. If you want to be offended, check out PureFlix Entertainment or Good Fight Ministries. Except don't. Religion should be about improving life, not making it worse, so if you're into religious films, see Noah instead of GND2.

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* I have a funny story about Zack Snyder that actually relates to Christiansploitation.

It came to light recently--and I will post my source on this if I can find it again--that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice topped at the box office because one of its main competitors on its opening weekend was God's Not Dead 2, which made a paltry $8 million dollars on said weekend. That weekend, when I went to the theater, I had only three choices: God's Not Dead, BvS, and Miracles from Heaven. We didn't even get Zootopia or My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, which is probably why at least the former didn't beat out BvS. BvS apparently did so well because it was only slightly less offensive than GND. In an alternate universe, Star Wars came out the same weekend as Dawn of Justice, and the DC Expanded Universe was no more. All for the want of a shitty religious movie--now made all the shittier.