The Night God Screamed (1971)

Mild-mannered and pleasant Willis Pierce (Alex Nicol) is a curious preacher to get a homicidal mad-on for, but when he very mildly berates the leader of the dope-smoking (gasp!) Jesus freak hippie cult that’s robbing him of the little money he is able to collect for his work, he thereby enrages the leader of the pack so much, the poor man is crucified on the big cross he just bought. The preacher’s wife Fanny (Jeanne Crain), who wasn’t into Willis buying a cross already, sees insult added to injury by finding his corpse. Her statement is also going to be responsible to send the cult leader to the electric chair, rather to the anger of his gang.

A year later, Fanny is working for the judge who presided in the cult leader’s trial. He asks her to babysit his quartet of teenage children for a weekend, because those young ones clearly can’t be trusted without a responsible adult around.

Unfortunately, it is this night when some cult members decide to take vengeance on Fanny, and soon a tense siege situation evolves. And believe me, Rio Bravo did not include teenagers among the besieged for a reason.

Going by its plot, its title, and the year it was made, one would expect Lee Madden’s The Night God Screamed to be a rather nasty bit of exploitation cinema. Alas (or fortunately, if you’re as mild-mannered as Willis was) that is not the case. This is a bit of cheap but mostly classy cinema, so much so even its hippie bashing – an easy bit of work in 1971 – does lack the nastiness in tone you would expect (hope for?).

As it stands, the level of violence and exploitation on display throughout the film would have been on the mild side for an ABC Movie of the Week. However, like with many of those films, Night is a perfectly decent little movie, shot with a degree of technical acumen, effectively structured, and pretty satisfying when one doesn’t go into it expecting a movie about a night during which god screamed.

As any actual TV thriller of the style would, this, too, does feature an aging Old Hollywood star in the lead role, and as in an actual TV movie, Jeanne Crain gives the kind of effective performance that carries a film like this through the vagaries of mediocre teen actors.

The siege sequence are competently tense and effective, though somewhat lessened after the fact by a pretty stupid and not exactly surprising plot twist, so there’s really very little to complain about here. Beyond the fact this isn’t the film about a preacher crucifying cult and/or screaming godhoods I was hoping for, but October is still young.

In short: Night Creature (1978)

aka Out of the Dark

While hunting a man-eating leopard, Great White Hunter – and in a turn absolutely telegraphing the film’s idea of subtlety also former war photographer, race car driver and so on – Axel MacGregor (Donald Pleasence, for reasons only known to him acting his ass off in a film that really doesn’t deserve him) is nearly killed by the beast, and mauled enough for a decoratively stiff leg. For the first time in his life, MacGregor has to admit he is feeling fear, so he does the obvious thing to restore his manhood: he pays various hunting parties to catch the animal alive, so he can let it loose on his private island and either kill it to restore his manhood or die in a really stupiddignified manner.

Alas, his half-estranged daughters Leslie (Nancy Kwan) and Georgia (Jennifer Rhodes), Georgia’s little daughter Peggy (Lesly Fine), Georgia’s bed buddy (and soon to be Leslie’s boyfriend) Ross (Ross Hagen), use just this moment for a nice family visit. So, while MacGregor is wandering through his island wilderness, the leopard has rather more tasty targets set before it, with a Yorkshire terrier as an aperitif, even.

On paper, Lee Madden’s Night Creatures does sound like a rather good idea, for the deconstruction of the Great White Hunter by confronting him with his failure as a father might not be the newest idea, but certainly is one that by all rights should be a decent base for an animal attack thriller with a bit more going below the surface.

Alas, that’s not this film, because the idea of keeping themes or ideas where someone in the audience might miss them seems to have been anathema to the people involved in the production. Consequently, the actors are permanently telling each other their inner states and the film’s themes beside the whole Pleasence/leopard duel in impossibly wooden dialogue full of bad 70s pop psychology, empty melodramatics and the kind of therapy speech that to me always suggests a complete disconnect with actual human psychology, not to speak a total absence of either believable, or beautiful, or simply effective dialogue writing.

It doesn’t help that only one of the three core actors – Pleasence, obviously - is actually good enough to deliver this dross with conviction and style, while Kwan in particular drones the nonsense with all the emotional involvement of robot, and Hagen’s only there to show off his chest and a lot of hair.

Whenever Pleasence is alone, or just stalking through the jungle, the film nearly becomes worthwhile, though Madden does his best to sabotage even these moments via judicious over-application of stylistic elements like freeze frames as well as random slow-motion and meaningful editing that is on the same level of intelligence and subtlety as the writing. Only from time to time, Madden stumbles upon a moment that actually is meaningful and effective (like the first major character death), but these moments of poignancy are, as is Pleasence’s effort, buried under so much dross I quickly found myself actually annoyed at the film’s empty gestures that only ever destroy the depth they are supposed to create.

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