Cataclysm aka The Nightmare Never Ends (Phillip Marshak, Tom McGowan & Gregg G. Tallas, 1980)

A lot of movies try so hard to be weird. These attempts by filmmakers and production companies to manufacture eccentricity are often pretty obvious. Far more interesting is the truly strange film that results when weirdos try to make something conventional. Cataclysm aka The Nightmare Never Ends aka Satan's Supper aka Shiver aka one of the segments from the anthology film Night Train to Terror (in truncated form with added claymation) is one of the weirdest damn things I've ever seen and a true hodgepodge of insanity. It's a good movie and a terrible movie happening simultaneously. It's half-baked and incredibly ambitious, with good, bad, and bizarro acting choices, a narrative that contains flashes of inspiration and stupidity and hardly ever goes where you expect it to, pretty good production design and effects, very cool shots, and some berserk editing choices.

Cataclysm, as you may have guessed from its three separate director credits, had a troubled production. Shot in San Diego and La Jolla, California (and a little bit of Las Vegas) in 1977, shelved and reanimated with additional filming in Salt Lake City in 1979, shelved again and brought back to life a third time with more Salt Lake City filming in 1980, the movie finally saw an extremely limited release in late '80. Veteran screenwriter Philip Yordan (who possibly wrote three of my '50s favorites: Panic in the Streets, Johnny Guitar, and The Big Combo; I say "possibly" because the uninterested-in-politics Yordan put his name on screenplays written by blacklisted friends in addition to his own writing work, so it's hard to figure out which of his credits are actually his) was writing mostly drive-in/grindhouse b-movies by the end of his career.

 Cataclysm began life as a disaster film, but Yordan switched gears mid-screenplay when The Omen became a hit and amped up the Satanic elements, turning the whole shebang into a horror movie. Yordan had also written the screenplay for a disastrous Brigham Young biopic a few years before, and though that movie also endured an extremely troubled production, the financiers of that fiasco took a liking to Yordan and were not deterred from working with him again on what would turn out to be another wild ride. This also explains the film's Salt Lake City rise from the ashes. The financiers even liked Yordan enough to let his wife Faith Clift play one of the leading roles, and, hoo boy, she is not good at acting.

Catch your breath and strap yourself in, because I'm going to make a foolish attempt to describe the story. 

Claire Hansen (Faith Clift) is a devout Catholic surgeon married to Nobel Prize-winning atheist academic James (Richard Moll, Bull on TV's Night Court) who is causing a stir with his latest book God Is Dead. Claire keeps having nightmares about a cataclysmic disaster that resembles a volcano erupting under the sea, and she's also having nightmares and visions about Nazis. Meanwhile, people are getting murdered by having their faces ripped off and 666 tattoed on their newly dead bodies. Oh yeah, and Holocaust survivor Abraham Weiss (Marc Lawrence) recognizes the Nazi murderer of his family on a TV talk show even though the guy is only in his twenties and couldn't possibly be old enough to have done it. Or could he? The charismatically demonic young man, Olivier (Robert Bristol), is an eternally youthful servant of Satan and a multi-millionaire who lives in a mansion with a bunch of sexy ladies. He's also possibly an ageless demon who can transform into a sexy lady demon who also may be a separate demon. I'm not sure.

Abraham's good friend, who lives in the same apartment complex, is detective Lt. Sterne (Cameron Mitchell). Sterne thinks Abraham's gone bonkers but is eventually convinced that Olivier is an ageless servant of evil. He tries to convince his skeptical partner Dieter, who is also played by Marc Lawrence, for reasons no one really understands. Sterne also has a hilariously combative relationship with the apartment complex's landlady. That's all the major characters, right? Wrong! I would be derelict in my duties if I did not mention my man Papini (Maurice Grandmaison). Papini is a defrocked monk who is desperately trying to warn Claire and James that the devil is coming for them. I usually find it irritating when the characters in a movie keep saying the other characters' names, but Papini is so much fun to say and hear that I really enjoyed the characters constantly saying "Papini." Try it yourself. Papini. Don't you feel a little better already? That's the power of Papini.

Most of our characters, even the older ones, tend to congregate at the same flashy new discotheque where the soundtrack is aggressively bad versions of then-popular disco and hard rock styles and where Olivier holds court in a throne in the corner. Watch out. He'll steal your girlfriend with his flashy demonic charisma. 

Whew. That just about scratches the surface. There's also some not-quite-fleshed out critiques of America's violently racist history presented in slightly incoherent ways, but at least they tried. The filmmakers also seem to think that an academic espousing the virtues of a godless society would get his own prime-time TV special watched by everyone and even listened to on the radio, but I guess it kinda works in the context of the film's weird universe. 

The film's troubled stop/start production history may explain narrative lapses like James announcing that he will be meeting with a group wanting to fund his research that has unlimited funds (the Satanists, duh), and then, in the very next scene, James gets mad when this same group calls to offer him funding, and he refuses to meet with them. WTF? Then, in the next scene, he MEETS with them! (It also probably explains his shifting hair lengths.) And his wife doesn't stop him even though she just got a warning that the devil is trying to turn him to the dark side. Idiotic moments like this happen throughout the film along with some choppy editing and the handful of weak performances, but the movie has a great look and design and some truly powerful and powerfully strange scenes, too. It's such a unique film that I have to salute it.

Contributing to the odd tone, the version of the movie I watched last night had a slightly slowed down soundtrack, so all the actors talked a few octaves lower than their normal speaking voices. This would have damaged most other films, but I feel like it slightly improved Cataclysm. Recommended if you enjoy weird times.

    

The Child (Robert Voskanian, 1977)

Robert Voskanian and Robert Dadashian, two Armenian-American film students in Los Angeles, were obsessed with Night of the Living Dead and decided to make their own low-budget, independent horror movie in the oilfields outside the city. Voskanian directed, Dadashian produced, both men edited, and their parents catered, with most of the cast and crew also taking on additional jobs. Lead actress Laurel Barnett doubled as the costume designer, with her thrift store finds clothing every cast member (she's in a different groovy thrift store dress in almost every scene), and screenwriter Ralph Lucas played one of the ghouls and was also the dialogue coach (not sure what that entailed). Michael Quatro, older brother of Suzi and uncle of Sherilyn Fenn, composed the far-out Polymoog synth score.

Voskanian and Dadashian and their mostly inexperienced cast and crew came up with The Child, a truly oddball surrealist nightmare delivered with talent, amateurishness, real vision, and a little incompetence. If these guys were better filmmakers or worse ones, this movie wouldn't be so damn interesting. They hit that sweet spot between lack of experience and surplus of imagination that leads to so much delightful weirdness. And novice cinematographer Mori Alavi (this is his only film credit) captures some genuinely beautiful and unsettling images and is great with shadows and light.

The Child takes familiar elements (zombies, a telekinetic child, the house in the woods occupied by a strange family, the protagonist who used to live in the area returning to find that things are not as they seem) and rearranges them in bizarre and exciting configurations while the actors deliver the goods in a space where "good" and "bad" have no meaning. Yes, this is my kind of shit. 

The Child begins, after an opening scene I won't spoil, with Alicianne Del Mar (Barnett) serenely driving down country roads. The car moves strangely, as if in a dream, and Alicianne soon drives into a ditch and gets stuck in gravel. She wanders through some ominous-looking woods and stumbles into an old woman, Mrs. Whitfield (Ruth Ballan), and her dog. Mrs. Whitfield invites her in for tea, and they have an extremely odd conversation about the woods, how Alicianne loves the woods and used to live in the area until her parents died, and how Mrs. Whitfield doesn't much care for her neighbors, the Nordon family, which is a little awkward because Alicianne has been hired by the Nordons to take care of the youngest member of the family, Rosalie (Rosalie Cole). 

After her cup of tea, Alicianne decides to wander through the creepy woods at night until she arrives at the home of her employer. Old Man Nordon (Frank Janson) gives her the business about being late, asks her if she's a nervous woman, says he doesn't like nervous women, and then heads up the imposing staircase mumbling about all the work he has to do. Adult son Len (Richard Hanners) stares strangely at Alicianne and apologizes for his family's weirdness. Len seems like a creepy weirdo in this scene, but he shakes it off and starts acting like a relatively normal dude in subsequent scenes. Turns out, he's been living in the woods with his nutty dad and nutty little sister next to a cemetery full of ghouls for too long and was just struck dumb by seeing an attractive woman his own age. He's the only member of the family who's not a creepy weirdo, though I did laugh quite a bit when he offers Alicianne some hard cider made by his buddy Tom with the following warning: "Be careful. It's very hard."

The youngest Nordon, Rosalie, is a strange child, though understandably so. Her mother was killed in the woods by "tramps" and her dad is a curmudgeonly grouch who only laughs when remembering the story of a troop of Boy Scouts who died from accidentally ingesting oleander. Less understandably, Rosalie likes to hang out in the cemetery at night with a pack of murderous zombies. When she's not hangin' with undead ghouls, she draws creepy pictures of them and laughs it up with her dad about dead Boy Scouts. Rosalie also has a bad habit of sending her zombie pals out for revenge when she feels she's been wronged. Alicianne is in for a wild ride with this Nordon bunch.

The whole movie has a strange, dreamy feel, with choppy edits, odd framing and camera angles, stilted or awkward delivery of dialogue, and narrative inconsistencies existing alongside gorgeous images, cohesive narrative moments, and naturalistic acting. Some of it makes sense, some of it doesn't, some of it looks professional and carefully composed, some of it looks amateurish and accidental. It's a curious, intriguing blend that I happen to like a lot. The zombies have a great look, too, with makeup, design, and physical movements that don't remind me much of other movie zombies. My only real complaint is that the character of Alicianne turns into a stereotypical hysterical, screaming damsel in distress in the big concluding scene, but for the most part, The Child is a unique bit of '70s cult weirdness.