Metacritic-Rezensionen

Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s eerily brooding Messiah of Evil remains an undervalued gem of American gothic filmmaking.

Given its troubled production history, Messiah of Evil is far from perfect. Mood can only get you so far when not much happens for a good hour of the film. But it flows with the blood of New Hollywood in its veins, defining the wave as more than just gritty dramas and excessive blockbusters.

Messiah of Evil is an underseen gem that manages to creep under the skin despite its very low budget.

Co-writers/co-directors Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz confound life and art, reality and dreams, sanity and madness in their surreal vision of conservative America succumbing to – or biting back against – the encroaching counterculture.

The film melds a “California Girls” sensibility (the Beach Boys song, to be clear) with boho fashion and depraved supernatural horror in a way that’s feminine, mesmerizing and lurid. There’s no other horror film quite like it.

Incoherent horror film about a woman, Hill, searching for her father, a surrealist painter in a small California coastal town that has become overrun with flesh-eating zombies. Katz and Huyck, who enjoyed great success as the writers of George Lucas' AMERICAN GRAFFITI, stooped to ripping off George Romero's low-budget masterpiece NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.