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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SCARLET WARNING 666 (1974)

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AKA It Happened One Weekend; It Happened on Sunday; Scarlet Love; Love Is Deep Inside; Rockey’s Style (?); Scarlet Love 666

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Beware

 

DIRECTED BY: Palmer Rockey

FEATURING: Palmer Rockey

PLOT: A detective, and his twin, investigate the murder of their sister at the hands of a money-worshiping cult.

Still from Scarlet Warning 666 (1974)

 

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The eccentric Palmer Rockey exhibits a complete failure to communicate his intentions with the baffling Scarlet Warning 666. Is it a legitimate attempt at an occult thriller, an arty anthem of nonconformity, an avant-garde meta-movie spoof, or just an excuse to cast himself in awkward sex scenes with buxom women? You’ll have no idea. File it with After Last Season as one of those mysterious objects you can’t believe actually exists.

COMMENTS: Bruce (the good twin) is walking in the park, as he often does when investigating the death of his sister Jackie. Spread out on a yellow napkin, he discovers flowers and feathers covered in sticky stage blood. A clue? But what about the swinging knife? The pirate hat perched on the coffin? The totemic feathered rattle? The spinning plastic skull lit by a flashlight? The belly dancer? The silent topless woman with big “pineapples”? All clues?

No, the movie does not have a clue. This impenetrable mystery is the magnum opus of one Palmer Rockey. Rockey was not an idiot. He was an army veteran and, surprisingly, he had a Ph.D. and had translated theology books into German. He was also a huckster, a womanizer, and some kind of sui generis madman. The opening of the film brags that Rockey plays 54 different roles—7 in front of the camera, and 47 behind it—but on screen, there are only 2 or 3 (it is often near-impossible to distinguish which character he is portraying). The film did, apparently, did go under 7 different titles, however. After its disastrous reception after its four-walled debut, a devastated but defiant Rockey further tinkered with his masterpiece for two decades, adding narration and reshooting scenes (removing his ex-wife Cookie, the former female lead, whenever possible). He incorporates footage from a student film he shot in the 50s, which is positioned as a nightmare/flashback and has nothing whatsoever to do with the later scenes. Knowing that Rockey added exposition throughout the years in an attempt to make the plot more comprehensible makes you wonder how puzzling the original must have been. His later narration is particularly bizarre, as he engages in dialogue with a falsetto version of himself discussing the movie’s genius, but also disparaging his own actors and deflecting criticism by claiming that the entire movie is a satire of some kind.

If you like bad acting backed by bad singing (also courtesy of Rockey, naturally), mismatched film stocks, continuity errors, characters who appear without being introduced, randomly edited footage, and jarring sound edits, have I got the movie for you! Despite the added exposition, I doubt the film’s plot can be reconstructed even by the most dedicated scholars. There is an artistic intent here—Rockey depicts himself as a little guy, a nonconformist fighting an evil, greedy cabal—but it’s essentially undecipherable. We will simply note that it all ends on a bare stage with blue walls and a blue floor, which is either the site of a cult ritual or a symbolic psychodrama. A shirtless Rockey poses in front of spinning yellow wheel of justice while impassive bikini-clad women stand around in the background, and later spin in a circle dance. It segues into some kind of trial, followed by an action sequence of some variety with wrestling, gunplay, and a surprise twist reveal. All acted out in front of an idol of a plywood eagle inscribed in magic marker with a dollar sign. And as the credits roll, the audience leaves none the wiser as to what just went on.

Scarlet Warning 666 (or whatever name the movie was known by) was lost for years, whispered about by and a few lucky others who caught it at its Dallas premiere. The flame was kept burning by obscure record collectors, who treasured Rockey’s supremely awful lounge-rockabilly soundtrack, and wondered in vain about the movie that had inspired such a bizarre artifact. Grindhouse Releasing actually tracked down a copy of the current version of the film and, in 2026, finally put out a Blu-ray for the first time, so everyone could see this astounding monument to one man’s misplaced egotism. The release is filled with interviews, including fans Stang and Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra, alongside contemporaneous witnesses like Rockey’s ex-wife Cookie and actor Ron DeSilva. But the portrait that emerges of the mysterious Rockey remains as inexplicable as Scarlet Warning 666‘s occult plot. The film, and the man, remain oddities of the weirdest stripe.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a study of storytelling madness that will either test the patience of even the most adventurous cult film explorer or make them dizzy with delight…  if one can make it past the first ten minutes of the film, there’s a chance for some fun to be had, with the movie gradually becoming an alt-universe ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me’ as Rockey attempts to mix vanity, inscrutability, and desperation into a single offering of cinematic puzzling.”–Brian Orndoff, Blu-ray.com (Blu-ray)

I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average

Palmer Rockey's Scarlet Warning 666

Palmer Rockey's Scarlet Warning 666

  • Move over, Ed Wood and Tommy Wiseau. Stupefying, incomprehensible, and utterly insane, SCARLET WARNING 666 goes beyond THE ROOM and PLAN 9.

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FANTASIA 2026: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: METAL MESSIAH (1978)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Tibor Takács

FEATURING: Richard Ward Allen, David Jensen, Liane Hogan, John Paul Young

PLOT: A mysterious metal man on a mission of peace and understanding is co-opted by a cynical music promoter.

Still from Metal Messiah (1978)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Largely incoherent, Metal Messiah is both energetic and meandering. Couple this with the outré performances and this 1978 relic stands as an example of movies that are beyond the realm of standard criticism.

COMMENTS: “Most people around here think I’m insane. I suppose there’s some truth in that. On the other hand, I wish they could see themselves under the same light.”

Seventy-six minutes, some dozen or so chapter headings, several text panels of introduction, and narration that, were it any more prevalent, might just transform Metal Messiah into a radio play: and that’s just the framework for what is perhaps cinema’s greatest reach > grasp ratio ever. Anycity, Earth is where we’re at, being confided in by the impressively garrulous detective (?), Philip Chandler. Upstairs in the hotel we catch some exposition on the room’s television: super-promoter and all around nefariously accented big time operator, Max, exhibits proof (?), courtesy of a blurry snapshot held up for the camera for approximately a second and a half, of a new danger to the world. Down in the streets, trying to spread the word of love to disillusioned rock ‘n’ roll youth, is an alien (?): nameless, perhaps, but truly the Metal Messiah.

This trio are what we’ve got. (Alongside cult leader/evil scientist Violet, with a surgical facility and a bag of Mick Jagger’s blood.). Where we’ve got it is across junkyards, dive bars, endless rainy streets, and a mystical desert wherein the Metal Messiah meets his doom to synthesizer strains. There is a lot of shouting, many observations from Chandler stating exactly what is occurring onscreen (presumably in case we’re looking away at the time), and a performance from John Paul Young as the enigmatic “Max,” whose single-shot monologue should be standard audition material for any performer wanting to qualify for the Big Time.

There are times during the Fantasia Festival when I am apprehensive after a screening. Having attended this event for this long, I’ve (happily) made many Fantasia buddies. And indeed, I cannot hold it against them when they ask the very sensible question, “What did you think?” In regards to Metal Messiah, that turned out to be more difficult a question than expected, and frankly I’m still not certain.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… it’s not without some strange fascination…. It can be deeply infuriating at times and it will test the patience of anyone hoping for a more traditional storyline, a cohesive musical vision or even a sense of why the protagonist really is.” — Kevin Lyons, The EOFFTV Review

I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average

Capsules

CAPSULE: ELDORADO (2012)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Richard Driscoll

FEATURING: Richard Driscoll, Darren Morgan, , Jeff Fahey, , , , Brigitte Nielsen, , Rik Mayall, Sylvester McCoy, , David Carradine (archival footage)

PLOT: Oliver and Stanley Rosenblum, a Blues Brothers tribute act, accidentally find themselves in Eldorado, where the Sawyer-style family ruling the roost has big plans for the town’s 200th anniversary.

Still from Eldorado (2012)

COMMENTS: I can be very forgiving if a movie has competent sound design: balanced dialogue audio, fleshed-out aural background, and adequate-to-good music. Eldorado failed me here, and in many other ways. This makes sense when you know a bit of history behind the movie: writer / director / producer / &c. Richard Driscoll apparently hoped to succeed in a Producers-style gambit, claiming a big movie whilst making it on the cheap. Sound design, surely, suffers from this underinvestment—but what are Eldorado‘s merits?

These include, and are probably limited to, the following:

  • Darryl Hannah as “The Stranger”, and her delivery of the titular poem by
  • A surprisingly touching reunion of Vietnam veterans, from Jeff Fahey and Bill Moseley
  • An homage to a famous Laurel & Hardy bit
  • Michael Madsen’s face, ever over-reacting in that roguish Madsenian manner
  • Peter O’Toole proving that even in his don’t-give-a-damn super-annuation, his floor of quality is higher than many actors’ ceilings

The rest is, alas, little more than a tedious curio with occasional blasts of badly mixed sound, music, and FX. There’s plenty that’s gross (though well within the average 366er’s tolerance), plenty that’s derivative (the fine line here being that much of said spoofing is by design), and plenty of questions—the most looming of which is, “Why, oh why?”—and the answer comes back: for tax fraud.

It would be remiss of me to recommend this to anyone—ever—except for the most die-hard of Rik Mayall fans. A curious actor, to say the least, and woefully underused. His performance as Mario the Chef transcends the surrounding doofery; and that’s even bearing in mind it consists mostly of lip-synching to a couple of pop-opera tunes. Had Eldorado been put completely under his creative direction, we may have had one of the grandest monstrosities of the new century.

Instead we don’t.

We have Eldorado.

_________________________________________________

Reviewer’s Addendum: Apparently I watched the 90-minute “Director’s Cut”, which I feel is more than sufficient despite being half-an-hour shorter than an earlier release.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“To say that Eldorado’s cast is eclectic is more than somewhat of an understatement. Quite how Mr Driscoll coerced such a parade of (one-time) A-listers to appear in his ‘Mamma Mia for horror fans’ (the filmmaker’s description – not mine) is beyond me. Surely they didn’t all need the money?  But you certainly get more than you bargain for with this ‘B’ movie: Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen and David Carradine (in his last albeit brief role) reuniting from ‘Kill Bill’. Jeff Fahey, Patrick Bergin and Brigitte Nielsen – who deserves a special mention for miming Ottis Redding’s ‘Respect’ in a hair salon whilst kitted out in stockings and suspenders. Throw a cameo by Caroline Munro into the melting pot and you sure have one big steaming pot of erm, surrealism.”–Paul Worts, Fleapits and Picture Palaces

(This movie was nominated for review by nc, who described it as “an incomprehensible mess, a hypnotically bad fever dream, a film so bad it’s hard to believe it even exists.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FUN IN BALLOON LAND (1965)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Joseph M. Sonneborn, Jr.

FEATURING: Balloons, marching bands, parade floats, clowns, and more balloons

PLOT: During an especially drowsy storytime, a boy has dreams about large parade balloons that cavort and loom over him; we then see the balloons in their natural habitat, the 1964 Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia, with play-by-play from a possibly inebriated narrator.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Exhibit A in the case for advertising’s malign influence, this hour-long promo for parade balloons is both horror show and monument to boredom. Viewed through the ironic shades of nostalgia, it’s gleefully ignorant, but as a relic of its era, it’s a searing indictment of the utterly misguided definition of “fun” among the City of Brotherly Love’s cultural elite.

Still from Fun in Balloonland (1965)

COMMENTS: Perhaps you started your day today with a viewing of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a hours-long march of giant helium balloons, high school bands, and uncomfortably cold Broadway performers hiking through the streets of Manhattan. They (and you) are partaking in a tradition that goes back to 1924, but that’s not even the oldest Thanksgiving street party there is. That crown is held by Philadelphia’s parade, created by Macy’s rival Gimbel’s back in 1920. So it’s more than appropriate to turn our gaze toward that venerable Turkey Day bastion, and see how it inadvertently spawned a turkey of a very different kind.

Fun in Balloon Land wastes no time in delivering off-putting weirdness with the shockingly atonal theme song, sung by a man backed by a group of faux-enthusiastic children and the world’s saddest roller-rink organ. Through slant rhymes and methodical destruction of meter, the “tune” previews attractions to come like the Marrying Turkey, suggests that a teddy bear has fallen arches, and just generally shreds the auditory nerve. Already, we’re off balance before we’ve even seen the opening credit for “Giant Balloon Parades Inc. Presents,” a declaration that doesn’t augur well for artistic achievement.

The film kicks off in earnest with the sleepytime dream of Sonny (whose name we won’t learn until the last 10 minutes of the film), who rises from bed to stand in the corner of a book of fairy tales like a punished child and starts imaging a series of locales that correspond perfectly with Giant Balloon Parades, Inc.’s product line, including an undersea kingdom, a farm, and a culturally insensitive Old West. Sometimes these scenes are accompanied by amateur dances, but occasionally the film gets ambitious and tries to tell a story, as when the boy dons a gold lamé diaper and blows off a couple of Philly-accented mermaids. The “magic” of the balloons is meant to be self-evident, so there’s no attempt to reference any actual fairy tales or stories of adventure; they’re just generic milieus. All of this Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FUN IN BALLOON LAND (1965) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FIEND (1980)

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DIRECTED BY: Don Dohler

FEATURING: Don Leifert, Richard Nelson, Elaine White, George Stover, Greg Dohler

PLOT: A “fiend”—an evil spirit that takes possession of a corpse and absorbs the life energy of humans-–moves into the quiet suburb of Kingsville, where a concerned neighbor immediately suspects a connection between the new resident and an unsolved killing spree.

COMMENTS: God bless the Don Dohlers of the world. They don’t have a lot of resources, they don’t have a lot of talent, but by gum they love movies, they’ve got determination, can-do spirit, and just enough cash and friends and family to put together a chiller. You don’t go into a Don Dohler movie with the hope that it will be very good, but it’s a whole lot of fun watching him in there giving it the ol’ college try.

Shot after his debut feature The Alien Factor, Fiend finds Dohler a more experienced filmmaker, but also working with an even thinner budget of a mere $6,000 to continue his bid to become the of Maryland. So he develops a story around an original monster–the title character, a kind of free-floating, body-possessing demonic entity–to sit alongside vampires, zombies, and werewolves. We get an impressively economical introduction to our star villain: after a shapeless red cloud plunges into the grave of a recently deceased man, the reanimated body rises and, within the course of the next 6 minutes, strangles a conveniently located woman in the cemetery, moves into a split-level ranch in the Baltimore suburbs (what was the house closing like?), and chokes another woman while she walks the five miles through the woods from her carpool stop to her home. 

This kind of efficiency is typical of Fiend, which does not waste a lot of time with details. In the space of a few months, the monster takes on the name Longfellow, acquires a cat and a lucrative career teaching music, hires an accountant-cum-Renfield to manage his extensive operations, and builds a combination music studio/shrine to Satan in his basement where he keeps an ample supply of professional headshots of his prospective victims. So it’s only fair that the only force powerful enough to stop him will be equally lucky. Gary is a persnickety neighbor who has it in for Longfellow from the start (supposedly because of the noise, but more likely because the newcomer has an even more impressive mustache). But he should play the ponies, because he immediately pegs Longfellow as the local serial strangler through intuition alone, with not a scrap of evidence to back him up—much to the frustration of his unduly patient wife. Fortunately, a visit to Longellow’s subterranean lair provides all the proof he needs, and the battle of wits commences.

The usual hallmarks of bad-moviedom are here. The acting is wooden and mannered, the score-by-Casio is repetitive and intrusive, and the script is driven by incredible coincidence. (Does the cemetery groundskeeper carry copies of the obituary for every corpse in the place?) But you can tell that Dohler is a deeply earnest storyteller. Compelled to shoot his scenes of mayhem in broad daylight, he makes the killer’s audacity add to the overall sense of unease. Recognizing the convention of secondary horror characters whose ignorance does them in, Dohler crafts a pretty decent action scene in which a bystander attempts to come to the aid of a potential victim, complicating the villain’s plans. Most intriguingly, he hands the hero’s mantle to the abrasive Gary. It’s almost charming to watch Gary barrel around, insisting that something suspicious is going on and bitterly rejecting his wife’s insistence that he lighten up. It puts an intriguing twist on the fact that he’s right about everything. 

On a side note, here’s a mystery for you: where the hell are Gary and Marsha’s kids? There’s no shortage of children in the film, including Dohler’s own son; one of those youngsters even ends up at the wrong end of Longfellow’s glowing hands. We’re certainly supposed to believe the Kenders have kids, because they talk a lot about their filmmaking project for Scouts (an opportunity for Dohler to drop the name and the address of his real-life bookshop), but we never see them, not once. Is this a scenario borrowed from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It’s truly bizarre.

Fiend is not a good movie. Crucially, it’s not a scary or suspenseful movie. But it benefits strongly from a second viewing, when you can set aside all the film’s ineptitude and appreciate the purity of the effort. Viewed in the right circumstances, it’s a goofy piece of fun, and the world of cinema can always use a goofy piece of fun. That’s a legacy to remember Don Dohler by, long after both he and the Fantasy Kingdom Bookstore at 704 Market Street have left the mortal plane.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Even the amateur quality of the performances contribute to the film’s overall dream-like feel…  I mean, don’t get me wrong. This is definitely an amateur film, full of clunky dialogue and the occasional slow scene. But so what? Even those flaws add to the film’s nicely surreal atmosphere.” – Lisa Marie Bowman, Through the Shattered Lens

(This movie was nominated for review by Joe. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Fiend (Special Collectors Edition) [DVD]

Fiend (Special Collectors Edition) [DVD]
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