As best as I can tell, some guy named Paul Aratow directed a movie in the mid-70s called Lucifer's Women. It was your usual Satanist booga booga exploitation fare, with the requisite goat heads, pentagrams, and catatonic women in negligees, seduced into offering up their poontang to the dark overlord of Americans for Tax Reform. A few years later, along came Al Adamson and Sam Sherman with their uncanny business savvy, ready to scoop up this wheelbarrow of dung and give it an Independent International Pictures makeover, transforming the wheelbarrow into a steam powered rickshaw with a broken axle, and tossing in more dung to fill it out to feature length.
The additional dung is in the form of an undeveloped vampire subplot stapled awkwardly to the pre-existing devil sacrifice storyline, along with some crap about a reincarnated Svengali thrown into the metaphorical commode. If I seem to be overusing the feces metaphor, it isn't without trepidation, and the nagging sense that I owe an apology to feces.
To pull off this striking cinematic facelift, Al brought in John Carradine, looking absolutely terrible with sunken eyes and hands withered by arthritis, and some veterans who had previously worked with Al in churning out excruciating messes like Blazing Stewardesses. To lend a shred of continuity, Larry Hankin appears in both the original footage, and the additional scenes tacked on by Adamson, possibly because he had a day off from playing "Biff" on Laverne & Shirley, and wanted to meet John Carradine. Finally, to eliminate any reason whatsoever for watching Dr. Dracula, Adamson inexplicably edited out all of the nudity in the satanic ritual idiocy, as evidenced by the original trailer which accompanies the DVD release.
What that leaves is Hankin as "Wainwright," a hypnotist who looks like John Turturro made up like Frank Zappa. Since he is demonically possessed by a reincarnated Svengali, Wainwright has a split personality issue. He hangs out with a multitasking Satanist book publisher named "Sir Steven," who prefers Svengali, and worries that Hankin's Wainwright persona is falling in love with Trilby, a titty bar dancer whom Sir Steven has decided is "an elemental energy source," meaning he'd like to have sex with her and then kill her. This is what can happen when bad film directors read the occasional novel.
Over dinner with Trilby, Wainwright explains with an air of intellectual depth usually found at Deepak Chopra book signings:
Life itself is so strong that it defies the bounds of petty logic and mere causality. Human life can transcend the individual and partake of the universe through an intense crystalization of form, and that is how reincarnation is possible, if the spirit is strong.
What makes the spirit strong?
The incorporation of souls. (dramatic pause) Human sacrifice.
I've heard about such things, but you don't mean to say that they go on today. I mean, it's murder.
Murder. Well, murder is a very hard term to define. People who are participating in a sacrifice don't look upon it as murder. Merely part of a process.
Exchanges like this may have inspired many of Dick Cheney's appearances on Meet the Press, and coincidentally, Anton LaVey was credited as a "technical consultant." What this meant isn't clear, but one could only pray to Beelzebub that it didn't include the choice of wallpaper in a scene involving Sir Steven, tormenting a blood stained prostitute slave. A yellow and white lattice pattern, behind what appear to be fried eggs over easy, each embellished with a green bow tie, provides an appropriate backdrop for the hooker kissing Sir Steven's feet while he laughs and pours his beverage in her hair. One can imagine the possibilities spinning through Adamson's head as he visualized the fruition of this untapped reservoir of film history.
There's also Adamson's wife in her obligatory scene, shoved into the middle almost randomly, but causing no discontinuity for the same reason that a comatose patient can't be annoyed by nurses chattering in a nearby corridor. She sports blue eye shadow applied with a spatula, and blotches of makeup on her cheeks that invoke incidents of domestic violence. As usual, she lowers the bar even further with her obnoxious delivery, providing one of the few remotely entertaining moments before being snuffed out by Dr. Dracula.
As you may know, Al Adamson's real life ended in a manner just as fucked up as most of his movies. After a couple of decades of churning out profitable yet insufferable refuse like this, he switched to real estate and was considering returning to filmmaking when he gained VHS cult status in the 1990s. But those plans came to an abrupt end when he had a run-in with a house contractor, who decided to murder Al and embed him in concrete beneath his own whirlpool. A few weeks after Al had been reported missing, the cops decided to jackhammer away the newly laid tiles, correctly surmising that they'd find his corpse. After he was tracked down, Fred Fulford explained that the murder was not a murder, but merely part of a process. Since the Church of Satan's variant of Sharia law is not recognized in California, this didn't fly in court. Fred was convicted and jailed, leaving us with dozens of Adamson/Sherman titles, and nagging questions about what sort of soft core pornography Al would have produced, inspired by 90s phenomena like The Teletubbies, Monica Lewinsky, and the Taco Bell chihuahua. Ah fate, you cruel bastard.
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