i find it heart warm and inspire that the writing team behind such hopelessly mainstream hollywood movie like indiana jones and the temple of doom and american graffiti and howard the duck would begin their career with a low budget exploitation horror film like this . perhaps a a testament to the talent that would earn willard hyuck and gloria katz an oscar nomination later in their respective career and messiah of evil have potential and but sadly become frustrate exactly because it can not muster the film make prowess to pull it off . the premise involve a young girl who travel to a small coastal town in search for her painter father who go miss a while back . it doesn not take long for the fragmented narrative to abandon all hope and dive headlong in disjointed absurdity and for a while it work admirably well to the point where you begin think that maybe messiah of evil need to be reclaim from the schlocky gutter of 70 exploitation a an example of artful mystery horror . the surreal non sequiturs keep pile on a the daughter stumble upon a young couple in a seedy hotel room who be in town to conduct a research on the local legend of the blood moon and a scruffy and half mad alcoholic ( play by the great elisha cook jr. in perhaps the best scene of the movie ) who warn her about her father only to be reportedly find dead in an alley eat by dog a little later and the blind old lady that own the local art gallery and who have inexplicably remove all of her father painting from the shop and last but not least a retarded and murderous and squirrel eating albino . part of the movie charm be precisely this brand of bargain basement artsy surrealism that defy logic and genre convention every step of the way . whereas with lynch it be obviously the mark of a talented creator and with messiah of evil the boundary between the intentional and the unintentional and the wouldo not really expect it to come out this way but it good enough wrap scene blur hopelessly . take for example the double narration that flow in and out of the picture in a drug addle and feverish and stream of consciousness way and one come from the daughter a she wander from place to place in search for her father and and the other narrated by her father voice a she read his diary . while be still talk about a living dead picture and messiah of evil be different and only loosely one at least with current preconception of what a zombie movie be suppose to be . the origin of the living dead here be a 100 year old curse and bestow upon the town by a mysterious dark stranger who come from the wood one day . in the meantime hyuck finds time for snippet of mass consumption criticism in a flesh eating supermarket scene that predate dawn of the dead by a good number of year ( you can hear the mst3k line already represent aman be dead and only his capitalist food tin remain ) and a nicely think but poorly execute similar scene in a movie theater . i generally think that the surreal work in careful and well measure dose how be the absurd to work if it not hide within the perfectly normal . hyuck seem to just smear it all over the picture and by do so dangerously overplay his hand . when the albino for example pick up a girl hitch her way to town and eat a squirrel in front of her and you can almost imagine the director wink meaningfully at the audience and amused and satisfied with his own hijinks . the general film make level be also pretty low after the half way mark and the pace become muddle and the story tiresome and evidently go nowhere and not particularly fast either . add to that the choppy editing and average acting and hyuck general inability to capture true atmosphere the empty street of coastal town be criminally misuse and i would file messiah under amissed opportunity but still grindhouse afficionados will find enough to appreciate even though it not particularly gory and trashy or sleazy .