Lucifer Rising

Entertaining, slow moving, insightful, and sometimes shocking fourth installment to the Kenneth Anger short film collection; it possesses all these attributes, as well as being influential to experimental directors of today. A lot of what Anger was doing in "Invocation of My Demon Brother" (film layers, fast edits, bizarre soundtracks) can be seen in most of the music videos on MTV; a characteristic that has driven parents, as well as teenagers, crazy. The primary source of these ideas came from the Acid Trip footage, extensively explicated in Tom Wolfe's lysergic-fused biographical novel, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." Nevertheless, the idea caught on and Anger utilized the technique to the fullest in "Demon Brother," counterweighted by an equivocal tape-loop supplied by Mick Jagger. In the second film "Lucifer Rising," Anger had already developed his experimentation with edits and layers, this time presenting a more formalized run to the film. Marianne Faithful makes an appearance in the film, as well as an assortment of 60's notables, which includes Manson family member Bobby Beausoleil who also wrote the film's score. Altho not Anger's best volume, (Scorpio Rising is the better) it still has many elements -- as I explained -- that will turn some people on; ergo, a cult following.

Another dose of Kenneth Anger's film-making, supremely silly of course but entertaining if one is in the mood for seeing minor celebrities prancing about pretending to be supernatural beings.

This is one of the more polished of his efforts, but (perhaps as a result) it falls far below less professional works such as Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome or Invocation of My Demon Brother. Far from being at the cutting edge of the avant garde, this is a much more derivative piece, reminding the viewer of films such as Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii, or even, in some of the sequences featuring Marianne Faithful, the old Fry's Turkish Delight advertisements.

Similarly, the music, recorded by convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil in prison, might have been expected to add an edge or frisson, but it's pleasant, spacey and bland, like an outtake from the Alan Parsons Project.

Impossible to take seriously, it's enjoyable at its level, and is worth immortality for the priceless credit of Lucifer played by Leslie Huggins.

A nice little trip for the connoisseur on the hunt for something bizarre, grotesque and visual interesting and/or the adept of magick a la Crowley and his kin. Luckily, the "movie" just runs 28 minutes and so we do not get the time to get bored by this experimental piece.

Lucifer Rising is a film that is jam-packed for all of its 28 minutes with images that are meant to do two different things depending on two different groups are watching: if you don't really know that much about all of the potent symbols and totems and markers and all of the things that link Satan and Lucifer and Hell to things like the Egyptians and the pyramids, then that's one thing. If you do know all about Mr. Crowley and his teachings and prophecies and so on and know what the images are meant to reference, then it'll likely be the blast of a lifetime. What I know is closer to the former, yet what I responded to most was Anger as a *filmmaker*, what he was trying to do and to make it both provocative and yet something that's, I suppose for him, easy to slip in to.

Now, I don't know all of the details of how Anger came to be among Satanists and other cultists (though the note that the composer of the film, Bobby Beausoleil, was a part of the Manson family and wrote/performed the psychedelic early Pink Floyd-era style soundtrack is one of the most disquieting things ever), but I have to assume that he wasn't born into it or raised with Satanists (they really came to be a 'thing' actually in the 70's, with Anton Levay and so on), so there's an element of indoctrination that makes the film so fascinating.

For about less than a minute of Lucifer Rising we see someone in a room reading a book (the camera pans back and forth and we see briefly what he's reading, only enough to gleam bits and pieces, and then an image of a devil or Satan fornicating), and I thought this worked well as a metaphor for the movie itself: Anger may be out to do something transcendent, but elementally it's all about consciousness expansion, and even if we don't come in knowing all of the representations of what this woman in Egyptian garb means or this guy in a cloak or that guy going naked into a tub, there's something about it all that feels like you're being taught some secrets, things that you certainly were NOT taught if you went to Sunday school (or if you're agnostic/atheist it's just alien information).

The other thing that makes the movie so evocative and moving in its gonzo form is that it's also, most likely, about some kind of transformation. There's another character - of course no one has names here, unless one counts the fact that a guy at one point puts on a jacket that has "Lucifer" on the back (a possible in-joke, or just a running motif, following from Scorpio Rising) - a young woman who is climbing up a mountainside. What is she going for? Well, because she is being called? Or because there's something that simply compels and orders her to come. There's no great mission we're seeing, no little girl that'll be possessed in Washington DC and a horror movie will come out of it (though that was going on at the time as well in cinema). Things presented to us amount to... you're currently just a man, or a woman, but what if you could be something more, perhaps?

This is experimental cinema, so many of the images will appear obtuse to those who come in to it cold. But the feeling of things constantly being ominous, of spells being cast and a cultish atmosphere, where people succumb and give in to someone else - giving up their power for someone else, essentially, and it all leading up to a giant, uh, space-ship that floats across the pyramids of Egypt (fx by Wally Weavers of 2001 by the way!) - and that I can understand. If a good deal of it flew over my head that may just be my problem. It certainly, at the least, makes me curious to know more about how many of these images connect and make into a whole 'Raising up Lucifer' story, to which a resurrection plot, however it's really relayed out here, is one that involves a mission and followers and invocations and incantations and other 'ations'.

Or it may be a load of pretentious crank, but I don't think it's fair to discredit it too easily. This is someone who's seen some things and, in his own warped and yet not hard to look at way, and it's an extremely well shot presentation that, once you get into its somewhat languid rhythm, is crisply edited, you know you've seen the dark side. Whether you decide to fully go there... well, I leave that to you. But as a film in and of itself, for what it's trying to do, it's eerie and effective and totally unique - and does it get much more, frankly, 'evil' than to have a Manson family member do the score?

Egyptian gods summons the angel Lucifer - in order to usher in a new occult age.

This film has been on my to-see list for almost twenty years. In the 1990s, I was big into the counter-culture scene and was reading quite a bit on Charles Manson. The name "Kenneth Anger" came up again and again, and his work was something I just had to see. But the opportunity never presented itself.

Now (2015) I have seen it, and it did not disappoint. Some have called it an extended music video, which is not far off. Others say it is something "occult", but even there I think that is slightly off. I doubt very much the people involved were taking themselves seriously, blending images and symbols from the Druids, Egyptians and Crowley... what an experience.