Messiah of Evil

Messiah Of Evil should be right up my alley. It's a horror movie that trades in a sludgy, surreal, dream-like atmosphere. I love movies like Helter Skelter, Broadcast Signal Intrusion, and especially Phantasm (my favorite horror movie of all time). I love when a movie gives you just enough details for the world to feel real and lived-in, and only just enough to feel as scared and paranoid and untrusting as the protagonists. Messiah Of Evil is trying to go for that, with its tale of a woman looking for her missing father in a small coastal town that seems to have a cult or a supernatural curse, or possibly both. But there is a way to go about this successfully, and that's where Messiah Of Evil drops the ball. Phantasm, for example, layers its mystery and surrealist atmosphere. Every time Phantasm gives the viewer an answer to a question, that answer invites a new question. Why is The Tall Man stealing corpses from the graveyard? To crush into mindless slave dwarves. Why does he crush them? Because of the intensified gravity on the red planet. Why does he send them to the red planet? Because that's where The Tall Man is from and he's trying to take it over. Wait, red planet? Yes, he came from there through an interdimensional gateway. And so on. You get enough details to make A picture, but never THE picture, intentionally leaving gaps for the viewer's imagination to fill in, which is always more frightening than getting the full explanation. Messiah comes at this idea from a different direction. It doesn't answer questions. It's more like reading a redacted report. All you're ever going to get is right there in that file. That's Messiah Of Evil. It omits information for no reason other than to do so, even as it vomits exposition through narration or a third-act flashback dump that will have you saying "okay, but ..." for several reasons. That is, if the movie has kept your attention long enough for you to remember the plot holes, because all that keeps this movie's heart beating is atmosphere and secrecy. Phantasm constantly keeps throwing new WTF ideas at the viewer; Messiah Of Evil just chugs along like a toy train at a speed just a few steps below being interesting. Messiah is a movie that solely wants to exist on its vibes and its mystery to propel it forward. If it slowly peeled back layers of the mystery like Broadcast Signal Intrusion does, showing how deep the well goes, it could be interesting. But there's none of that. It's a constant low-level hum of "this is a weird town, where is my father", until the end when he shows up, drops his expositional load like a narrative dump truck, and then all hell breaks loose for a finale that, as crazy as it is, leaves the two most important developments to happen off-screen and be relayed through narration. Oh, and did I mention that this movie does the in media res opening? I LOVE THE IN MEDIA RES OPENING SO MUCH, IS MY SARCASM SHOWING. I can see why some people might dig Messiah Of Evil. It's an incredibly slow burn and does have creepy, gothic atmosphere. I've now seen two movies with Marianna Hill in the past week, and I can't say she's my cup of tea, but she fits the 70's horror scene, so, YMMV. Overall, I found the pacing to be a drag, and the way it played the central mystery unfair and unsatisfying. Not bad, just a disappointment.