Help Me... I'm Possessed

This practically unknown 1970s gore movie was "presented by" Will Zens, the guy who made TO THE SHORES OF HELL (1966), THE STARFIGHTERS (1964), and SPY SQUAD (1961), all memorably daffy Z-movies. HELP ME, I'M POSSESSED, slackly directed by Charles (VOODOO HEARTBEAT) Nizet, has an anything-goes quality that cuts through the subpar acting, dialog, and plot.

Arthur Blackwood is a psychiatrist treating hopelessly crazy patients at his private sanitarium in the Nevada desert. He's a bit hopelessly crazy, too, with his torture chamber basement -- complete with a guillotine -- and a twitchy, hunchbacked assistant, Carl. When a patient dies, Carl hacks her to pieces with a hatchet while, nearby, one of the imprisoned madmen gets very visibly excited. It's that kind of movie.

Blackwood's experiments on his sister have created a barely-seen tentacled creature that lives in caves near the sanitarium. It makes sounds like the inside of a kennel just before the dogs get fed. Blackwood describes her having a "disembodied sense of evil" that lives in all people, which he was able to bring to life. Instead of taking his amazing discovery to the scientific community, Blackwood sends it out to murder local teens and cops.

A rather dim Sheriff shows up a number of times, questioning the increasingly belligerent and paranoid doctor. Bill Greer, who plays Blackwood, also wrote the incredibly lame dialog. For example:

BLACKWOOD: Death is a state of mind.

Later, when Blackwood's sister meets the Sheriff:

WOMAN (to Sheriff): Are you a real sheriff?

SHERIFF: As a far as I know...

When Blackwood's wife Diane (Deedy Peters) shows up, the movie picks up a bit. The doctor's mute chauffeur makes a pass at Diane, so Blackwood puts out one of his eyes with a hot poker -- "If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out," he rants.

When a male patient gets loose and attempts to torture a near-naked woman, Blackwood tosses her into a coffin with a poisonous snake and closes the lid. The patient refuses to repent his sins, so Blackwood decapitates him in the guillotine as he quotes scripture. Later, Diane finds her husband's notes while snooping around his lab, in which he writes, "When I saw his head severed from his body, I felt a definite sexual thrill."

Other riotous elements include the Sheriff's office set, which features a bright green prop phone; the filmmakers' desire to use women with red or silver hair; and a mouse that kills a cat (off-screen).

Also known as THE POSSESSED! And VANGITTU.

I don't like to rush to judgment, but sometimes movies make it woefully easy to do so. From the moment this begins its production values are so extraordinarily low that it seems unfair to any other given work to draw comparison. Just as much to the point, it becomes necessary to actively restrain oneself from flying off the handle with effusive, bewildered, profanity-laden criticism of the writing, direction, and acting. I'm not inclined to doubt the earnestness of anyone's effort, mind you, but that just makes it all the more sad that their capabilities are sorely lacking. I plainly recognize how hard some folks are trying, and sometimes their contributions produce reasonably appreciable results. "Sometimes" and "reasonably appreciable" don't get us very far, however, and the simple truth is that "Help me... I'm possessed" is a rough ride from the very start. It's not entirely rotten, but the entertainment to be had here is vanishingly little.

There's no aspect of the film that doesn't suffer from the low skill level of the participants. Some individuals, and some odds and ends, irregularly come off better than others, but that's unfortunately about the best that can be said. Nearer the upper end of the spectrum of quality one might cite actors Dorothy Green and Lynne Marta, the somewhat atmospheric music and sound effects (even though they are sometimes misused), the chief filming location, and the production design and art direction. Commonly inhabiting the lower end of that spectrum, there's not only Charles Nizet's direction and all facets of Bill Greer and Deedy Peters' writing, but also much of the rest of the acting, including that of Greer and Jim Dean; the editing, and the cinematography; and even the lighting. Even making allowances for a low budget quite insults amateur filmmakers of subsequent years, who have sometimes achieved great things with even less resources at their disposal.

There are workable ideas here, perhaps, but they are mostly treated poorly in the screenplay, and maybe even more poorly in execution. In a diminutive runtime we're more than halfway through before we're greeted with one sequence - only one - that comes off fairly well in its entirety. In the last twenty minutes or so it seems that the picture is building toward a sinister reveal, but the payoff only feels like half a thought, and is far less than fully convincing. In fact, the last stretch including the climax might be the sloppiest portion of all, in every regard, and to be frank I'm just not sure what Nizet, Greer, or Peters thought they were doing. From top to bottom 'Help me... I'm possessed' is a mess, and that some scattered tidbits find more success than others seems like a stroke of pure luck more than the result of the effort anyone applied. I guess I'm glad for those who get more out of this than I did, but I'm not sure how they manage to do so.

My recommendation is to just not ever bother with this in the first place. Only those with inexhaustible curiosity could have any motivation to watch, and for as floundering as the whole is with scant, minor exception, the feature just isn't worth anyone's time.

Hahah -- this movie rulez. Putting it on my top ten list of Video Finds of the Year, courtesy of a gloriously goofy over-sized overstuffed clamshell cased VHS only release by Screen Gems from the days when video stores were cool. And you could actually find movies made by people who were thinking for themselves rather than row upon row of generic, unimaginative crap made for enough money to feed all the starving kids in the world even without Bono's guidance.

This was made on less than his sunglasses budget for an entire year and is a movie with no formula, no precedent and nothing quite like it. The only movie it even remotely reminds me of is Al Adamson's BLOOD OF DRACULA'S CASTLE, which (along with CASTLE OF BLOOD: Check "Blackwood Castle" for more info) this may very well be a sly homage to. It shares many of BODC's basic traits: Wacky eccentrics living in a Mission style castle/mansion in the middle of the southwestern California nowheres keep girls chained up in the basement & conducting perverse experiments on them, have a horrible secret, a twisted mutant caretaker and chauffeur, and great taste in color schemes. Everyday people happen upon them and are unable to cope with their "alternative lifestyle", which just happens to include things like sadistic torture, dismemberment of shapely blonds, and locking girls up in coffins with snakes. Which is all part of the routine for the community of characters, like people from a Simpson's episode. It is we who are the monsters.

It's just that kind of movie, and made with a twisted sense of humor that is just one knowing wink short of being a parody: It's the horror movie as kitsch, not quite on the sarcastic level of ANDY WARHOL'S FRANKENSTEIN or CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS, but made from the same sort of day-glo patterned cloth. Plus the same carpenter, who got a lot of work in this one with a series of identical looking boxes that various things are locked up in. There is an intoxicating, arty sense of self awareness to how the movie was made, which celebrates it's low-budget roots without ever talking down to it's audience, nor the lead actor's hairpiece. Like a Jess Franco movie the film is better than it looks, resembling an ultra tacky 1970's low rent exploitation thriller filmed by Claude Monet. I come back to the colors again because they are dazzling -- Neon reds, acid greens, powder blue lab coats and hot pink go-go miniskirts on well lit sets that are spotless. Most low budget horror from this period had a drab, brownish, under lit look, and this one has the palette of a Magilla Gorilla cartoon along with the skewed perspective of a twisted pulp graphic novel. It even makes sense that after the mad doctor's nurse is killed she re-appears without a scratch to be killed all over again.

So seek this one out. It's what we call a howler: A horror shocker that is supposed to be watched in raucous laughter crossed with glimmers of surreal unease, and beer. Share it with friends and they will remember it fondly, which is not something you can say about most of these things.

8/10 for being totally unexpected.

Another haywire cinematrocity from Nevada-based schlockmeister Charles Nizet, wherein a doughy, toupee-mantled mad doctor and his toiling hunchback sidekick oversee the usual scientific quackery in a remote desert castle(which looks suspiciously like the architectural enclosure of a miniature-golf park). The castle's other residents include the doctor's mentally touched sister, a curvaceous nurse, and several beastly nut-cases imprisoned in their surprisingly tidy subterranean dungeon, patiently waiting to be tortured and killed. Said doctor's heedless experiments have yielded an awesome, uncontrollable beast which occasionally emerges from a nearby cave to kill random passers-by(between you and me, this soup-kitchen excuse for a Lovecraftian monster is merely a handful of red licorice ropes being waved around in front of the camera).

Side-splitting in its majestic ineptitude, and amateurishly played by a cast of nobodies(unless your notion of "star power" applies to Lynne Marta, a LOVE BOAT-type 70s TV personality, and quondam girlfriend of STARSKY AND HUTCH actor David Soul), HELP ME, I'M POSSESSED is a fire-breathing leviathan of rampageous celluloid bilge which deserves far greater esteem as one of best of the worst.

6/10. Recommended.

Set in a tacky faux castle in the middle of the desert, and featuring those mainstays of trashy horror, the mad doctor and his hunchbacked assistant, Help Me...I'm Possessed is a prime slice of '70s drive-in schlock, complete with torture, murder, and a bargain-basement Lovecraftian creature mutilating innocent folk.

Bill Greer plays Dr. Arthur Blackwood, who professes to be attempting to rid the world of the inner evil that lurks in every man and woman, but who isn't above experimenting on his patients, and killing them whenever necessary (his torture dungeon even features a guillotine). Deedy Peters is the doctor's unsuspecting wife Diane, who visits the Blackwood Sanitarium, where she meets her husband's one success story, his sister Melanie (Lynne Marta), once unpredictably violent but now a harmless woman-child.

Unfortunately, the process used to achieve results involves the physical manifestation of the patient's evil, and one such malevolent creature (which looks like strands of spaghetti being dangled over the camera lens) is loose in the desert, killing the locals.

Directed with a ham-fist by Charles Nizet, this gloriously inept piece of z-grade horror delivers just enough deviancy to make it a fun time for fans of grindhouse garbage: a victim has her legs cut off so that she will fit in a crate, a sadistic redheaded nurse is stripped and sealed in a box with a venomous snake, and a man is decapitated on the guillotine. Another nurse is pursued through the woods by the 'evil tentacles' in a scene reminiscent of The Evil Dead (the woman even ends up in a wooden cabin - is Sam Raimi a fan by any chance?). None of this is in the least bit scary, the minimal gore is unconvincing, the acting is atrocious, and the film does drag in places, but it's all so kitsch and campy that it's hard not to like to some degree.

4.5/10, rounded up to 5 for IMDb.