Back in the mid-80s, I wouldn’t be surprised if you found Charles Band bowing at the grave of H.P. Lovecraft. The two adaptations he co-produced – RE-ANIMATOR (1985) and FROM BEYOND (1986) – made him some nice change at the box office ($2 million and $1 million, respectively, with neither getting a higher run than 190 theaters). Not only that, the two Stuart Gordon helmed films were deemed instant classics, lending Band’s Empire Pictures the credibility it certainly needed at the time.
Band was no doubt aware of this when he mounted an ambitious little project entitled PULSE POUNDERS in 1987. The concept behind this anthology was to provide half hour mini-sequels to a couple of popular Empire productions – THE DUNGEONMASTER (1984) and TRANCERS (1985) – and fill the third slot with another Lovecraft adaptation. With Gordon tied up filming ROBOT JOX (1989), Band took directorial control but planned a full RE-ANIMATOR reunion as he brought back Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, and David Gale for an adaptation of Lovecraft’s short story “The Evil Clergyman.” Also back was screenwriter Dennis Paoli, who put the kink in the earlier adaptations and continued that path here.
Selecting “The Evil Clergyman” to adapt is an odd choice because it is only a four-page story. In fact, it isn’t really a story but a portion of a letter Lovecraft sent to a friend describing a dream he had and it was published posthumously in 1939. Damn, this means when Stephen King dies we’ll get adaptations of his emails and Entertainment Weekly articles. The plot involves a man spending a night in a room and seeing the past as a former priest burns some mysterious religious texts and then commits suicide by hanging. After witnessing this ordeal, the protagonist looks into a mirror and realizes he is now the priest and his body has been overtaken.
This adaptation opens with a woman named Said Brady (Barbara Crampton) arriving at a castle to visit the room of her former lover. The landlady isn’t too welcoming, but lets her into the room. But not before accusing Said of having an “unhealthy obsession with sex and death” and saying she was once more beautiful than her. Damn, Gramma, put away them claws. Anyway, our female lead gets into the room and is quickly visited by the spirit of Jonathan (Jeffrey Combs), a former priest who greets her with a ghostly goosing. She tells him that she has come to “make peace with your memory” and apparently that can only be done by getting it on. Jonathan proves he was quite the lothario by getting her into bed and stating, “Your body is my religion.” Man, I am totally going to use that line.
Unbeknownst to Miss Brady, crawling around on the floor is a rat-man creature (David Gale). Post-close encounter of the coital kind, she wakes up in bed with Jonathan missing and this tiny beast licking her. Uh, gross. She is then greeted by a ghost of a clergyman (David Warner), who informs her of the perverse and deadly past of her lover. In fact, he was one of his victims and shows this off by exposing the bashed in left side of his face. He tells her that the rat-man is Jonathan’s animal familiar and that “he only wants your soul.” Ladies, you thought your old boyfriend destroying your credit rating was bad? Brady then has her second encounter with Jonathan and he proves how well hung he is…and not in the way you think, pervs! He admits he committed suicide and then does the act again, hanging himself in center of the room from a ceiling beam. He’s still alive though and asks her to kiss him. When she says she can’t reach him, he slyly says, “Kiss me like you used to.” Damn, brother be smooth. This gives us an implied hanging blowjob that you know Lovecraft always wanted in his work. The clergyman reappears to stop her, but she bashes his head in and then proceeds to hang herself. Her death complete, Jonathan begs his familiar to have her body and it is granted. The short ends with Miss Brady walking out of the room with Jonathan’s soul now nestled safely inside. Damn, he is totally a freak.
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