Welcome back to my Dark Corner of this Sick World.
‘What are we talking? Evil priests, devil worship, human sacrifice?’
Prime Evil is one of the very few films that we’ve reviewed directed by a woman, Roberta Findlay,
who spent most of her career in adult films.
‘I bet you’ve never seen one this big before’
A sensibility that occasionally shows up in this movie.
‘Remove the worldly garments and join our flock’
But not much.
This is pretty standard devil worship, opening with evil doings in a medieval cult.
‘Our lord god Satan’
'I will excommunicate you for this blasphemy'
before jumping ahead to...
which in this case is the 80s.
'The way he looked at me I could tell he eas a breast man, his eyes went straight to boob level.'
Really 80s...
‘Wall Street!’
Where we learn the cultists achieve near immortality by sacrificing members of their own family, every 13 years.
‘You get extra points if they’re virgins’
Quite the turnover of virgins, so good news for George Parkman, his granddaughter, Alex, has remained a virgin.
‘Maybe I don’t think happiness is jumping in and out of bed with other people’
After being abused as a child, because this is a film that spectacularly fails to find a consistent tone.
‘Don’t you want to get poked’
At the same time...
‘We need someone from the church to infiltrate the cult’
nun Angela goes undercover in the satanist group, the leader of which masquerades as a priest.
‘Like the church we too are concerned with money and power, but we don’t deny it’
You’d think an undercover nun would liven things up.
‘Nun accused of devil worship is excommunicated’
Alex’s sacrifice will take place at the winter solstice but Satan expects a bit more than one dead girl,
so the cult’s hired goon is enlisted to kidnap Alex’s friends…
and not let their boyfriends stand in the way.
‘If you have to take anyone out it’s got to look like an accident’
Accident, got it. Right
Right.
‘The police aren’t convinced it was an accident’
Shocking. The girl meanwhile has run as fast as she can.
I feel she could have run faster.
‘Too much to drink huh?’
‘Yeah’
'Have fun buddy.'
I wonder why he had blood on his face? Ah well, nothing to do with me.
‘What is this? A Psychodrama?’
Nothing about that sequence makes sense,
there’s no reason for Lurch to kidnap the girl while she’s with her boyfriend,
but they wanted a sex scene, a fight scene and a chase scene, so there we go.
‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that’
And that’s kind of true of the whole movie because,
all the cult has to do is wait for the solstice and sacrifice Alex, but that’s not a movie so other stuff has to happen,
like Alex being seduced by the head satanist.
‘You touch my very heart, my very soul’
and why not? He’s a smooth one with the ladies.
‘Come to me Kathy, in my mouth’
This makes Alex’s fiancée, Bill, jealous
‘Forget about Bill’
not unreasonably. And so…
Down goes Bill.
Alex’s mother tries to protect her.
‘She’ll move in with you over my dead body’
Oh you just can’t say that in this kind of film.
And she too is killed, despite a valiant attempt to hide in a chair.
Alex’s friends keep getting picked off and picked up
‘Don’t you think that’s a little strange’
but it doesn’t change anything or move the story, we’re still just waiting.
‘This is getting tiresome’
None of the ‘investigators’ actually discover clues,
they just reach a point in the movie where it’s time for stuff to be said.
‘I think her family’s mixed up in a cult and we don’t have much time because some ritual’
That comes from nowhere, and the cops go to confront the Priest/Satanist.
‘Shoot’
I imagine gunning down unarmed priests is standard procedure.
So to the final ritual which Alex turns up to without any trouble or sense that she was ever not going.
‘It is time, come’
'Come.'
Enter Satan,
but...
He’s stabbed by the undercover nun, raising the question;
the priest is bullet proof but satan can be stabbed?
‘Cut the crap fart breath’
Prime Evil is as hard to review as it is to watch and for the same reason; because lots of stuff happens…
but none of it matters.
None of it impacts on the outcome.
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Given the number of cultists sacrificing family every 13 years the police took a long time to notice this,
in what other movies have the police seriously dropped the ball? Let us know in the comments below.