BLACK EVIL A hackjob so bad, I can't even tell if this sucks While video boxes that lie to me annoy me to no end, I do enjoy video boxes which make boastful claims. This one says "If you watch only one movie this year, watch Black Evil!" Then it says that this movie is "In the tradition of Lost Boys and Near Dark", despite it having predated both movies by fifteen years. So, I went in with my hopes...well, not exactly high, but I was hoping for a fun time. How many blaxploitation horror movies have been made in the past 20 years, anyway? Few enough that if you want to see one, you've pretty much got to go back further. But I'm glad I didn't check the IMDb before seeing this one; the visit would only have raised my doomed expectations higher. One of those vampire movies which never uses the word "vampire" (points for getting on this lame bandwagon early, I guess), Black Evil tries to put a black spin on the vampire story by adding flashbacks to tribal Africa and a truly godawful, knee-slappingly lyric-specific R&B song about vampirism. There's all sorts of pretentious stuff about how the need for blood should be seen as an addiction (but not to something normal, more "like a passion for soiled underwear, or urine."), while we also get visions of some white guy wearing a silver mask dressed up like he's supposed to be going to a masked ball or something. Some good ideas about black culture as it relates to "modern" western culture are tossed around, but none of it really sticks, especially once the Christianity angle is introduced. Duane Jones (unrecognizably from Night Of The Living Dead) stars as the doctor of anthropology and geology who gets pricked by an ancient African artifact, and is later stabbed with it three times, and he becomes a vampire. Or so the non-moronic people in the audience has figured out, but for the rest of you, we then get several title cards that tell us EXACTLY what we just saw, and conclude with the statement that this doctor "...could not die, nor could he be killed." I'm guessing the "nor could he be killed" part is included for the same people who haven't figured out he's a vampire. (To be fair, the version of this movie I saw was about 80 minutes long, and the IMDb lists it as being 110, so a considerable hackjob was done on the version I saw, and who the hell knows what was taken away or added?) Now, this guy isn't ENTIRELY a vampire in the traditional sense; sunlight seems to have no effect. And he doesn't spread vampirism by biting people - only the magic ancient dagger can do that. But he sure does drink blood, and after a while, he doesn't much care where it comes from. But, like so many movie vampires, this guy is really a romantic at heart, and he even starts romancing the wife of his dead friend, who killed himself on his property. Possibly over the constant police harassment due to being married to someone named "Ganja". Pushy lady; she even got past the help to get into the wine cellar where he kept her husband's body. After seeing the body, she doesn't phone the cops - instead, she keeps her dinner date with the doc that evening so that she can sound indignant and storm out, setting up a lengthy shot of the doc just sitting there, until she comes back...and asks him to marry her! But not before the power goes out, which nobody notices because it's in the middle of the conversation, and they finish up the conversation before even mentioning the fact that they're now standing in the dark. I don't know what it is about black people and blood in the movies - ever since I was a kid, I seem to remember fake blood on blacks in the movies being unusually bright compared to fake blood on whites. Does it just show up on camera better? Hell if I know, but I do know this: as a kid, it would always freak me out to see a black person bleed in a movie, whereas I never got the same freakout from whites. I'm not so freaked these days. People's faces and other subjects we're supposed to be looking at are often cropped in half by the bottom of the screen; you expect this on the sides due to awful pan-and-scanning, but the bottom? That scene were the doc sits at the dinner table waiting for the girl to come back isn't the only one like it; late in the film, he goes to church in an attempt to get Christ's blessing, and it just goes on forever, and throughout it, we barely even see his face and how he's reacting, which is the only thing there we want to see. We just hear the choir and listen to the preacher guy ramble on fairly standard preacher stuff...if this isn't here to pad the film out to feature length, then why is it here?. Out of all the stuff that must've been cut to get to the short version I saw, I can't imagine why this stayed. After he gets blessed in this scene, he then, swear to God I'm not making this up, runs through the fields in slow motion while taking off his clothes. The only "silver bullet" against these vampires is the shadow of a cross, which hilariously spends the climactic scene chasing one of the vampires around. Who the hell is that masked honky, anyway? And I can't say I'm really all that sold on the racial ideas being thrown around here. Obviously, race is central to this movie's themes...sort of. The only white people (other than the masked guy) are in the first five minutes; after that, the cast is all black, and anything this movie has to say is solely about blacks' relationships with each other. There are two kinds of blacks in this movie: vampires, and pimps/hoes/the help. None of their stories have happy endings. The introduction of Christian themes at the end of the film is incredibly awkward, since not only is this "shadow of the cross" presented with such goofy literalness, but it doesn't seem right that a movie which spends so much time lovingly trying to tell us about African cultures would ultimately have them either convert/succumb to Christendom so cheerfully, or by being chased around by a freakin' shadow. If this movie's trying to tell us about the effect of Christianity on Africans, it's forgetting one important point: Christianity never killed anybody, Christians did. Bottom line: I can't tell if this is a senseless butchery of a good film, or if it's just the worst movie I've seen in a long, long time. Certainly, a brief poke around the IMDb reveals it to be quite highly regarded in its complete form, and something of a significant landmark in black cinema; lots of references to the mix of African folk music with American spirituals, but the closest thing I heard to African folk music here is an annoying, oft-repeated chant of children saying something like "Boogeyman, boogeyman!, and the extremely frequent bits of classical music seem to only serve to demonstrate how cultured the doctor is, something we'd figured out early (like him being a vampire, and that not being able to be killed is part of not being able to die). It may well be that Black Evil is just a brutal hackjob of a great movie mostly known as Ganja & Hess. But I won't be running out to track down the 110-minute version soon; maybe that ain't fair towards the movie, or to myself (who I may well be depriving of a good movie), but after these 80 minutes, I just don't care. Written and directed by Bill Gunn, Black Evil is also known as Black Vampire, Blackout: The Moment Of Terror, Blood Couple, Double Possession, and Vampires Of Harlem. BACK TO THE B's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE