Director: Terry Becker
Writers: Charles Dennis from a story by Terry Becker and Lou Whitehill
From: Pure Terror (only 1 remains!)
Watch: archive.org
A death cult uses the blood of kidnapped women as an ingredient in their immortality serum.
A cult is kidnapping women in Manila and yet no one thinks to call Black Cobra to save the day. Consider my suspension of disbelief gone! Although we hear that many women are being taken, we follow a specific group of four. They’re taken into the jungle where they meet a cult whose goals are unclear at first. Eventually, our main character Laura learns that they’ve had visions of her coming. Who she’s supposed to be or why she’s important isn’t clear, but the cult wants her to join them.
The cult is an immortality cult that bleeds its victims and mixes the blood with special herbs to remain eternally young. Laura is going to be inducted, but watches the cultist drain one of her fellow captives which makes her refuse. She gathers the other women she was kidnapped with and escapes, but they’re captured and sent back to the cult. The high priest, though, has had a change of heart and decides to help her and her friends escape. One woman refuses, slightly misunderstanding the situation. She thinks if Laura refuses the offer to live forever, one of them can take it instead. She tries to tell the high priestess that she’ll join the cult, but falls into a pit and dies.
The other three women, with the help of the high priest, escape, but he starts aging rapidly once he crosses the magical barrier surrounding the cult’s land. He stays behind and dies as the women flag down a passing motorist and return to the city. Laura comes back with the authorities, but they can’t find any trace of the cult. The high priestess watches through a telescope as Laura says, “I was there.” THE END
Another movie without much going on. While there are two escape attempts and the horrific revelation of what the cult’s doing as well as what awaits those who refuse to be inducted, the moments all stand apart. It’s not that there’s no connective tissue, it’s that there isn’t much lead-up or foreshadowing of anything. The movie has an ambling tone to it, if that makes sense. We don’t jump from scene to scene nor do we gallop through events, we move at a nice casual pace through each essential plot point, never revealing too much or putting much weight on any revelation. What’s lacking from the movie is any sort of tone—either perilous or strange. The nature of the threat the women are facing isn’t particularly clear to the characters and it’s not made clear to us. Likewise, the surrealism of being offered membership of a cult that dreamed of you before your arrival isn’t played with at all. It’s all just kind of bland.
I feel like I’ve had a string of these lately, the movies that I recommend neither for watching nor avoiding. This ones feels a little slighter than the others, a little more nothing, but not so much as, say your typical Marimark film. I feel like everyone involved in this movie did the work, but only the bare minimum, like it was something they worked on between gigs in commercials.
While I’m not recommending it, I will note that it’s in the public domain. I’ve added a copy to archive.org here. I don’t know that it has much riffing potential, but it might be fun to use a b-roll in an editing project or for a music video.
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