The Demon Lover (Donald G. Jackson & Jerry Younkins, 1977)

I have a deep love for DIY regional micro-indies made by people operating way outside of the major and minor systems of film production and distribution who never went to film school and who work regular jobs but have a burning desire to make a movie and put it out in the world. Even when these movies are bad (and a lot of them are), they capture a weird, wild sliver of life that gets smoothed over and flattened in the professional arena, and the performances and narrative construction, even at their roughest and most amateur, have a living, breathing aliveness that I find endlessly compelling.

The Demon Lover is a rough, ridiculous, but never dull slice of Upper Midwest do-it-yourself insanity, made by a couple of Michigan factory workers with delusions of grandeur and an inability to quit. Filmed in 1974 or 1975 (depending on the source) and released in '76 or '77 (again, depending on the source), The Demon Lover's troubled production birthed not just one but two cult films. The Boston-based cameraman Jeff Kreines, hired as cinematographer for most of the shoot (though he was fired and rehired multiple times and preceded and proceeded by others who were also fired or quit, including Texas Chain Saw Massacre cinematographer Daniel Pearl, which possibly explains why Leatherface actor Gunnar Hansen appears in one scene as a professor of paranormal studies), agreed to the job if he could bring his girlfriend, documentarian Joel DeMott, along to shoot the making of the movie. It did and did not go well. Her documentary, Demon Lover Diary, came out in 1980, and my wife and I can't wait to watch it soon. It has been compared to both Chris Smith's American Movie and the Apocalypse Now doc Hearts of Darkness and is a favorite of Kelly Reichardt's (she's even hosted screenings).

Rabid film buff Donald G. Jackson was working in a Michigan auto factory and approaching middle age. Inspired by the success of another regional indie, the aforementioned The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, he decided to turn his filmmaking dreams into a reality, with the help of factory co-worker Jerry Younkins. Abandoning the private eye screenplay he later said he would've preferred to make, Jackson was convinced by Younkins to shoot a demon possession movie instead. (He claimed near the end of his life to regret making the movie and that it conflicted with his Christian beliefs, but at the time he said it would be his Citizen Kane.) The pair decided to direct the film as a team, with Jackson directing the crew and Younkins handling the actors. Younkins also played the lead role, black magician and coven leader Laval Blessing, under the hilarious pseudonym Christmas Robbins. When Younkins accidentally sliced off part of his finger at the factory, he vowed to funnel the $8,000 workers' comp payment into the film, but Jackson claims Younkins spent the money before shooting could begin. The story soon morphed into the legend that Younkins sliced off his finger on purpose to help finance the movie. What is true is that Jackson mortgaged his house and his car to hire a professional crew and get the movie made.

And my lord what a picture. The Demon Lover is far from polished and only semi-competent, and Jackson and Younkins are in way over their heads, but the movie is never boring, repetitive, or conventional, and its historical documentation of the accents of Michigan burnouts, party dudes, average Joes, and young adults in the mid-'70s is an invaluable resource. A lot of these DIY cult movies have a handful of great, crazy, and/or unintentionally hilarious scenes alongside repetitive or dull stretches (a small price to pay to see something you've never seen before), but something crazy as hell or funny as hell happens in almost every scene, and nothing is re-used or belabored. It's a fun watch from start to end.

Laval Blessing (Younkins aka Christmas Robbins) is an independently wealthy guy who lives in a castle in rural Michigan and hosts get-togethers with a group of long-haired party dudes, their short-haired nerdy friend, and several women the party dudes want to get with (many of whom were local high school girls members of the cast and crew wanted to date; I grew up in the '80s and early '90s in the small-town Midwest and am shocked now when I think about how many adult men dated teenage girls and how normalized it was). These get-togethers involve both partying and the study of black magic in hopes of forming a coven with Laval as the leader. To give you some idea of the screen presence of Younkins/Christmas Robbins as Laval, imagine when Scott Thompson played a metalhead or a stoner on Kids in the Hall crossed with Danny McBride in The Foot Fist Way with a sprinkling of Eastbound & Down crossed with Black Oak Arkansas singer Jim Dandy in the video for his solo tune "Ready as Hell." Laval has an impressively long and thick head of brownish-blonde hair, and he wears a black leather glove on his left hand for the entire duration of the film. At first, I thought it was an affectation for the black magic ceremonies, but he even wears it to karate class and while pounding beers at the bar. The dude commits.

Laval hosts a blowout party one Friday night for his coven with the goal of performing a power-summoning ceremony. His pals take this occasion less seriously, choosing to get drunk, play records, and dance while Laval gets ready in a tent in an upstairs room. The diminutive, short-haired, glasses-wearing nerd especially busts a move, dancing his ass off with total confidence. Good for you, buddy. When the ladies revolt at the ceremony's required female nudity (Laval keeps trying to tell them it's not sexual and that women's bodies hold tremendous power, but they won't listen), and the dudes side with the ladies, Laval loses his cool, punches one of the dudes, Damian (Val Mayerik, who later made his name as a comic book artist and the co-creator of Howard the Duck!!!), says "you fuck with Laval, you get the horns," and has a tantrum in his now-empty castle, crushing a wine goblet in his hands. While picking up the shards, a mysterious woman who wasn't at the party but is somehow there now approaches him. Did he summon her?

Soon, this mystery woman is buck naked and ready to lie down in a pentagram. Where have you been all my life, mystery woman? Laval harnesses the power of female nudity and pentagrams to summon a demon with glowing red eyes who will avenge the Satanic Jim Dandy by killing his ex-friends who bailed on the ceremony. (Did you catch all that? There will be a quiz later.) The naked woman disappears from the film, just as mysteriously as she entered.

Oddly, one of these party poopers is murdered in the scene preceding the party scene. I'll leave the questions for the chronology nerds. I trust the artistic process, baby. After two kids with guns find this dead woman in the woods, a Michigan-as-fuck homicide detective gets involved. We get a great scene a few murders later where he shows the crime scene photos to his dorky partner, who is unfazed by the bloodshed but can't stop remarking upon the quality of the images and how top-shelf the camera must be. I love it.

What follows is more demon carnage and mayhem, and many other fantastic scenes, including a ladies' hangout sesh where the women blast each other with shaving cream while listening to funk records next to a poster for Steven Spielberg's The Sugarland Express, the homicide detective's visit to Laval's castle where he encounters Laval in the backyard chucking knives into a tree, a karate class where Laval gets his ass thoroughly kicked by his instructor despite the glove, and a bar fight where Laval and a few pals destroy a room full of drunk Michiganders. I'm not sure what the karate class scene is in the movie for, but I defend to the death the filmmakers' right to include it. I love scenes that are in a movie for no other reason than personality, flavor, and vibes. I thought an ego-bruised Laval would sic the demon on his karate teacher or that the bar fight would be his way of regaining face, but he doesn't even start the bar fight. Somebody else jumps him. Maybe the point is that Laval is great at everything except karate. He's rich, he owns a castle, he can summon demons, mysterious nude women appear in his home, he has a massively full head of hair, he can powerfully and accurately throw knives into trees, he can win bar fights, but he sucks at karate. It humanizes him.

This is all a great time, but apparently it wasn't such a great time behind the scenes. Jackson went broke, Jackson and Younkins struggled with each other for control of the movie, the East Coast crew snobbishly made fun of the Michigan rubes to their faces, the documentary crew and Jackson didn't get along and some people even accused them of deliberately sabotaging the feature to make their documentary better, the inexperienced directors made many mistakes, people were fired and rehired and fired again and other people quit, some scenes were unusable, Younkins publicly disparaged the movie, Jackson veered from grandiose statements about the film being a future masterpiece to horrendous crises of confidence, everyone had to keep the film's subject matter a secret from Jackson's ultra-religious parents even though several cast and crew were staying at the parents' home during the shoot, and, in the most shocking production moment, guns were fired, possibly at some of the crew, thanks, indirectly, to Ted Nugent. That's right.

I'm not sure who connected the filmmakers to Nugent (it may be in the documentary), but the right-wing rock star was living somewhere close to where the film was shot, and he loaned several guns to the production. He was originally hired to do the film's score while in a rough career patch between the breakup of the Amboy Dukes and his successful solo career, but he snagged a major record deal and bowed out. (Nugent later left his home state of Michigan for Waco, Texas, after finding Michigan too liberal.) When a night shoot ended disastrously, Jackson lost his cool and tore up the set, and allegedly he or someone in his camp used one of Nugent's guns to shoot at or near the vehicle carrying the Boston contingent. They sped off and never returned, though most of the film was done by that point. Jackson was critical of his portrayal in the documentary and how it was edited together and claimed the Boston crew were only there for six days, but so much information is contradictory or murky.

This is so much more fascinating than an Avengers movie or that new Colin Farrell/Margot Robbie thing, am I right? Shockingly, Donald G. Jackson went on to have a long film career in the b-movie world after some fallow years, rebounding with the pro wrestling documentary I Like to Hurt People. His other credits include co-directing Hell Comes to Frogtown and several of its sequels, the El Chupacabra film series, a whole bunch of post-apocalyptic roller blade movies beginning with, uh, Roller Blade, Lingerie Kickboxer, Rock n' Roll Cops 2: The Adventure Begins, and something called Rollergator, in which a teenage girl helps a small, purple, "jive-talking," skateboarding alligator escape an evil carnival owner played by Joe Estevez. Jackson died of leukemia in 2003. As far as I know, Jerry Younkins is still walking the earth, but Christmas Robbins never acted again. Younkins' only IMDb credits are this movie and the documentary, but his page does include an incredible piece of trivia: "Has authored several good books on knives." I was able to find a Detroit artists' site that showcased some of Younkins' collages. Check those out here.

I'm closing it out with a big hell yeah, brother, to The Demon Lover. I was continuously amused and entertained for the duration. Besides, what other movie connects Ted Nugent, Howard the Duck, Leatherface, and Kelly Reichardt?

The Black Cat (Albert S. Rogell, 1941)

One of the approximately 680 movies (most of them pretty good) called The Black Cat that claim to be based on the Edgar Allan Poe short story while having nothing whatsoever to do with Poe besides a black cat showing up at some point (I've reviewed at least two and possibly three on this site; our late, great tortoiseshell cat Fern was absorbed by Fulci's 1981 version), 1941's The Black Cat is also one of the approximately 680 movies about a group of shady characters stuck inside an old dark house during a storm and one of the approximately 680 movies about a group of untrustworthy relatives and their associates gathered together to hear the reading of a will, with murder and conspiracy following. Are there hidden passages in this old dark house? You bet your ass.

This Black Cat gives you the enjoyable familiar standards, but, like You'll Find Out (reviewed here last month), it also breathes some fresh weird life into the old formulas, particularly in the first half, and features a stacked cast including Basil Rathbone, Bela Lugosi, a young Alan Ladd, a young-ish Broderick Crawford (this is the only film I've seen where Crawford sprints, jumps, and rolls around in mud, which would be unimaginable even ten years later), and my personal favorite, Gale Sondergaard, who steals the movie from absolutely everybody, even the black cat.

The gold-digging relatives of Henrietta Winslow (Cecilia Loftus) have converged on her Gothic cat-filled mansion upon the news that the elderly Henrietta is at death's door. Once arrived, they can barely hide their extreme annoyance that the old lady appears to have made a full recovery. Henrietta decides to read her will to them anyway from her wheelchair, two kittens on her lap, since they're all assembled. Everyone finds out how much of the estate and its fortune will be distributed their way, but the best part of the will is interrupted by the arrival of realtor A. Gilmore Smith (Crawford) and his absent-minded comic-relief associate Mr. Penny (Hugh Herbert), an antiques appraiser.

Gilmore was a neighborhood kid who used to hang out at the mansion until he was banished as a teen for throwing rocks at the cats (he's also highly allergic to them). He's also harbored a lifelong crush on Henrietta's granddaughter Elaine (Anne Gwynne), the only Winslow with a conscience. Gilmore has been working out a secret deal with Montague Hartley (Rathbone), the husband of Henrietta's niece Myrna (Gladys Cooper), to sell the estate once Henrietta dies, but finding the old lady as strong as an ox, he pitches the sale to her. She refuses, but lets Gilmore know she likes his moxy.

The rest of our prominent characters are Henrietta's other granddaughter, Margaret Gordon (Claire Dodd), who is having an affair with Montague, Myrna's hotheaded son Richard (Ladd), Henrietta's nephew Stanley Borden (John Eldredge), who would be called a failson on social media if he were a man of today, the mansion's gardener/handyman Eduardo Vidos (Lugosi), and the mansion's housekeeper Abigail Doone (Sondergaard) (more on her later).

Back to the best part of the will. Because of the timing of Gilmore and Penny's arrival, only a few of the assembled know the will's final stipulation. (But which few?) Abigail remains in the mansion and takes care of the cats until her death. Then, and only then, will the rest of the will go into effect. The shady business starts almost immediately after this scene, as does a massive thunderstorm that washes out the nearby roads. 

An attempt to poison Henrietta's milk accidentally kills one of the cats. Henrietta takes it to the property's cat crematory and mausoleum where her own ashes will be displayed along with her deceased pets (her cats are so much cooler than her stupid relatives), but something shady goes down there, too. Meanwhile, a black cat (the only kind of cat Henrietta does not love and is superstitiously afraid of) has begun wandering the property and following people who end up in a world of trouble. From then on, it's hidden passages, conspiracies, attempted murders, red herrings, cat hijinks, Mr. Penny hijinks, and family intrigue. Everyone is suspicious; everyone is a potential victim. All of this is a bad time for the characters and a good time for the viewer.

Though the actors are just fine in their roles, they all pale in comparison to Sondergaard. Doing an even more enjoyable spin on her black-clad Gothic housekeeper character from 1939's The Cat and the Canary, Sondergaard's portrayal of Abigail is the clear highlight of an already enjoyable movie. She hates Henrietta's family and takes great pleasure in letting them know it. She has some spooky, witchy qualities, and her motives are mysterious. Sondergaard gives her character so much energy, humor, style, and sensuality, and she's a constant pleasure to watch. I'm a big fan.

The oddball character building of the first half gets a bit lost in the second half's more conventional old dark house mystery, but the whole thing really zips by, and the crisp black and white cinematography is a real pleasure to look at. I give this one a solid recommendation. If you like Gail Sondergaard, cats, old dark houses, and dysfunctional families, you're probably going to have a good time with this one.