1985, United States. Starring Lash LaRue, Anna Lane Tatum, Cynthia Bailey, Mary Dalton, Paul Holman, Cynthia Farbman, Marc Matney, Tony Shaw, Robert Bushyhead, Suzie Martin, Dean Jones, Steve Templeton, Page Elizabeth Ray, Eric Mikesall, Tony Elwood. Written by Phil Smoot. Directed by Phil Smoot.

If there's one Western film genre above all others with which I'm unfamiliar, it is, and I mean no pun by it, that of Westerns. I've watched precious few Westerns--though I now own one or two starring Cuneyt Arkin which I haven't yet watched--and most of the ones I have seen have been recently-made low-budget horror flicks, or complete oddballs like El Topo, which I suspect is about as typical a Western as, say, Brazil is a science fiction film. Mind you, The Dark Power isn't a science fiction film. But its main claim to fame, and very likely the only reason that it was ever made, is that it features a B-Western star known as Lash LaRue.

I'll try to steer clear of value judgments on this one, mainly because they're kind of beside the point. Writer/director Phil Smoot wrote and directed one other feature after this, Alien Outlaw (also starring LaRue), and thereafter worked only as a production manager or "miscellaneous crew" member, according to IMDB. This script appears to have been his first (at least professionally), and he states on the DVD that he wrote it in four days. And it was clearly written around Lash LaRue almost the same way that Ed Wood nearly did backflips (of course, that guy was an adept acrobat of logic anyway) just to work Lugosi footage indispensably into Plan 9.
LaRue played some bit parts in a couple of films about, respectively, Nazis and a circus. But he got his big break through a bit of prevarication, pretending that he was an expert with a whip so that he could play a black-clad villain who would have a change of heart before the end of Song of Old Wyoming. In the process of learning to use the whip, he cut himself up pretty badly--he even contended that some of those scars never went away. The producer, however, was amused, and so they found a professional to train him to use a whip more effectively.

It turned out to be a good career move. His whip-wielding character, The Cheyenne Kid, was so popular in Song of Old Wyoming that LaRue got fanmail from people who didn't even remember his name, addressed to "The Cheyenne Kid" or "That guy in black." It wasn't too long after that he took the name "Lash." Thus began a career that stretched from the late 40s to the early 70s wherein he starred in countless Westerns, some of which were, in B- tradition, so strapped for cash that they re-used footage from earlier films to pad out their running time. The general consensus is that his best film was 1950's King of the Bullwhip, praised for unique camerawork and imaginative fight choreography (both the hero and the villain used whips), and when I finally obtain and watch that film, I'm likely to post my thoughts here.

I haven't found much in terms of detailed non-cinematic biographical information on Lash, but it seems that his life outside of film was a bit rocky. He had a staggering number of failed marriages, and developed a drinking problem that he finally cleaned up sometime between the 70s and the 80s. I gather that he was a bit low on money in the 80s, which may explain why he ended up as a warden in the '84 film Chain Gang. Phil Smoot was a camera operator on the same film, and did what almost any aspiring filmmaker would want to do: he talked to the former star and found a way to put him in a picture.

I don't suppose it was hard to talk Lash into it. He may have had his troubles in life, but by all accounts he was very friendly and gracious with his fans. He sounds almost like the David Warbeck of the Western circuit. Plus, the gaffer from The Dark Power has a comment on IMDB stating that, when nothing else was going on, Lash used to be able to idly whip individual squares of toilet paper off of a roll with just a flick of his wrist; and frankly, that's hard not to admire in and of itself.

Smoot's film with Lash was apparently a pretty big deal; locally, it made headline and front-page news, it seems. It seems that people really liked the guy. I've even read that Lash was part of the inspiration for Indiana Jones. So far I haven't read anything to confirm that, but obviously that inspiration would have come from a film made earlier than The Dark Power. Honestly, I don't see much of his talent in The Dark Power that's inspiring so much as suggestive of inspiration... and so I guess the one gripe I will make about the film here is that they could have showcased their star more effectively.

To be fair, that would have been pretty tough on their budget. Smoot avers that when Lash cracked a bullwhip, the sheer power and resonation of the sound was incredible, and like nothing that their sound equipment could come close to capturing. Of course, some better camera angles might have at least captured the form more evocatively; the first segment of the film shows some chunky kid being chased down by a pack of seemingly feral dogs just patrolling the woods before Ranger Girard (Lash) cracks his whip about a million times in the air and scares them off. The problem is that each camera angle feels like part of a mosaic; you can see bits and pieces of what's going on, but mostly it's frustrating and disorienting, kind of like a college art film. You see the tip of a whip cracking, then part of a dog's head, then a hand with a whip handle, then a couple of canine shoulderblades, then that kid's face in the dirt, then Lash thrusting forward, ad nauseam (and that doesn't take long with this camerawork), all while constant whip cracks play on the soundtrack. I guess it was meant to be sort of a slow, building tribute, but it's mostly grating and confusing.

Anyway, I'd just as soon not dissect The Dark Power. However, since, upon review, this post was a bit too light on anything even resembling summary, I'll throw in something. An old Native American man, John Cody, dies in the beginning of the film during the last stages of a local news focus on living wills, unfortunately before he's ever able to dictate that will. The reporter, Mary Dalton (whose actual name is Mary Dalton and in real life had worked as a reporter), decides to focus on some of Cody's beliefs. It turns out that he had ancestral claim to all of the land that he owned, but didn't claim it until the people who were buying it up refused to obey his strange directives in cleansing the land. Basically, it transpires that Cody believed that four ancient Toltec sorcerors, who practiced some kind of blood-drinking black magic not unlike that of Amando Ossorio's Knights Templar, somehow peregrinated their way up into the Carolinas. They believed that by being buried alive, they would somehow become immortal (obviously, they didn't have much influence on Poe).

The rest of the plot involves Cody's son leasing out the land to a bunch of college girls. One of them is racist, and another whom the other girls invite is black, so the racist brings her brother in, which enables the film to have one of those "bad college kid" parties which consist of he and his drunken redneck friends drinking something that's probably like Natty Light, yelling derogatory terms at the black girl, and listening to crappy 80s music. Anyone who gets naked, almost gets naked, uses any racist language, gets needlessly violent, or otherwise does something which one can construe as being "bad" ends up dying, reinforcing that whole argument relating to punitive character-killing in horror films.

Of course, they get killed by four Toltecs whose direction and makeup kind of reminds me of various Full Moon films, and those Toltecs in turn are destroyed by the surviving college girls and Lash LaRue, who ends up in what I guess is a King of the Bullwhip-esque whip duel with one of the Toltecs (as one reviewer commented elsewhere, "If you're going to duel with whips, don't challenge a guy named Lash").

Now, if you know anything about the Toltecs, or even Mesoamerican religion in general, then there are certain dubious aspects to this script. If you happen to know that in the time of the Toltecs, there were a couple of large and probably warlike civilizations in the Southern and Southeastern U.S., well, then it's even harder to believe that four sorcerors not strong enough to just survive persecution in Mexico ended up wandering for hundreds of miles just to bury themselves alive on the East Coast.

Plus, the racial issues are treated in discomfiting ways here. Ranger Girard, for instance, apparently had a chip on his shoulder about Cody reclaiming ancestral lands until he learned that it was to keep evil sorcerors from crawling out of them. And y'know... in an age where the Western Shoshone are still struggling to maintain ownership of even a fraction of the vast tracts of land which technically unbroken treaties promised to them, well... I dunno, it's kind of hard to empathize with Ranger Girard. And while I'm sure that racism is a continuing problem to this day in southern college living, let alone the South at large, it's not really treated intelligently or compellingly here. It just kind of pops out of the script, and then it's stuck there until ancient evil happens by to clean the slate with the blood of the unworthy.

Of course, there's also a scene in which Mary Dalton talks to a grad student she meets and talks about setting him up with one of the girls renting a room in John Cody's place. This happens near the middle of the film. After it, those characters never enter into the film again. So perhaps all of the insensitivity relates to Phil Smoot just trying to come up with character complexity on the fly as he scrabbled together something resembling a script in four days. Almost every word of this movie feels unfinished, like a block of wood that an artisan never quite transformed into his vision, or, if you will, a jpeg file that never quite finishes downloading, remaining forever blurred with just a hint of what it might have contained. Sure, it's got fun elements. But it's not a particularly great movie, even by the standards set by the genre of "something evil kills college co-eds."

This film's not quite crazy enough to be, say, a Gymkata or a Strike Commando, and honestly, I'm unlikely to really want to watch it again anytime soon. So be it. At least the film has no pretensions and seems to move toward an express purpose, if not exactly unerringly. Regardless of its flaws, and they're legion even by B-movie standards, it's hard not to sympathize on some level with a film in which a bunch of locals made a movie with an old legend. Lash LaRue isn't just in this movie. He's the heart of this movie. And it's hard to go too far astray with that.

Labels: Horror: Zombies, Year: 1985