“You certainly have an unhealthy obsession with sex and death. Oh well, who doesn’t these days.”
Shortly before Empire went bankrupt and Charles Band rebounded by founding Full Moon Features, he had been working on a project entitled Pulse Pounders, which was intended to comprise mini-sequels to three of Empire’s biggest hits, The Dungeonmaster, Trancers, and Re-Animator. The first two received direct follow-ups, but the “sequel” to Stuart Gordon’s schlock horror classic is more of a spiritual successor, featuring the same cast and crew (minus Gordon) but adapting an entirely different H. P. Lovecraft tale.
Alas, as Empire folded, the original negatives for the project were misplaced in the shuffle and the film was considered lost for decades, becoming a bit of esoteric trivia among genre fanatics. Nearly twenty-five years later, a VHS workprint was located in some dank recess of the Full Moon archives, and Band stated his intention to polish up the three segments as best as he could and finally release them. First up is The Evil Clergyman, which is based on a letter Lovecraft wrote shortly before his death that recounts a strange half-remembered dream he had. Scored by brother Richard Band, the film presents a hazy narrative of a woman trapped in a waking nightmare as she encounters the ghost of her dead lover and a nefarious demon-rat with the face of a man. It is impressively odd and grotesque, its dreadful effect weirdly enhanced by the grainy VHS quality of the release.
As he did with his other Lovecraft adaptations (Re-Animator, From Beyond, Castle Freak, Dagon, all helmed by Gordon), scripter Denis Paoli takes the skeleton of Lovecraft’s story and laces it with sexual perversions and occult creepiness. Barbara Crampton is visiting the castle where her lover (Jeffrey Combs), a hedonistic Catholic priest, has recently hung himself in his own cell. She’s only there to collect her belongings, but no sooner has she been led to the departed’s room by the landlady (Una Brandon-Jones) than she finds herself confronted by the specter of the dead man himself. They embrace and make love, but when she awakes from her post-coitus slumber, she finds he has disappeared. But she’s not alone; in his place are a Bishop from Canterbury (David Warner) and a ghastly rat-human hybrid (David Gale) that the Bishop refers to as the dead man’s “attendant demon,” which seems to feed off of her terror.
By intention, it’s never exactly clear what’s going on. Characters wink in and out of existence, die and come back to life. As the chaos builds and Crampton endures the creature’s torment, the mini-freakout turns increasingly perverted, culminating with Crampton performing oral sex on Combs’ sentient corpse as it swings from a noose in the garb of a priest. It’s capped off by Combs kissing the rat-demon and plucking one of its hairs from his tongue afterward.
Though it probably wouldn’t have fared well in the immediate wake of Re-Animator and From Beyond, time has ripened The Evil Clergyman. It is always a pleasure to see Combs and Crampton working together, and John Carl Buecher’s effects work on the hideous impish familiar from Lovecraft’s ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ is a creepy treat. It’s a devilishly twisted fever dream that certainly feels like an extension of the Crampton-Combs-Gordon-Paoli Lovecraft collaborations. The worst thing about it is that it doesn’t even last for half an hour.