Director – Paul Wendkos, Teleplay – Jimmy Sangster, Photography – Jack Woolf, Music – Lalo Schifrin, Art Direction – Richard Y. Haman. Production Company – Frankel-Bolen Productions.
Dack Rambo (Andy Stuart), Elyssa Davalos (Jessica Gordon), Richard Lynch (Mr Rimmin), Dan O’Herlihy (Father Kemschler), Kim Cattrall (Lindsay Isley), John Harkins (Father Wheatley), Erica Yohn (Agnes), Lilian Adams (Beatrice), Richard Sanders (The Doctor), Natasha Ryan (Cindy Isley)
Jessica Gordon, a clothing designer in San Francisco, meets Andy Stuart after he bumps into her car with his van. Andy has her car repaired and then woos Jessica, proposing to her only a week after meeting her. However, Jessica is being monitored by a group of Satanists led by Mr Rimmin who whisk her to New Orleans to keep her away from Andy. Andy finds a newspaper article about a girl who came out of a coma and then drew occult symbols. He flies to New Orleans to investigate, finding that the girl is Cindy, the daughter of his ex Lindsay Isley. A priest comes, determining that the only hope for Cindy is conducting an exorcism.
Paul Wendkos (1925-2009) was a director I always thought should have done more than he did. His one moment of pure stylishness was the occult film The Mephisto Waltz (1971). Wendkos made several other theatrical films, little of note, except perhaps for the hit of the teen film Gidget (1965) and two of its sequels. Almost all Wendkos’s work was in television in a five-decade career beginning in the 1950s, which included episodes of many classic tv series such as The Untouchables (1959-63), Dr Kildare (1961-5), I Spy (1965-8) and The Invaders (1967-8). He also made a number of tv films, including the classic The Brotherhood of the Bell (1970) and several genre offerings such as Fear No Evil (1969) about a ghostbusting duo, the deathdream fantasy Haunts of the Very Rich (1972), The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1974), a remake of The Bad Seed (1985) and the ghost story From the Dead of Night (1989).
Good Against Evil is a bandwagon jumper aboard the 1970s fascination with the occult and deviltry that had been inspired by the twin hits of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973). Elyssa Davalos is the chosen figure – a la Mia Farrow’s Rosemary – destined for some sacred marriage (quite what is never made clear). The film’s most obvious debt of inspiration to The Exorcist comes during the latter half where Natasha Ryan is introduced as a possessed girl and priest Dan O’Herlihy is brought in to perform an exorcism.
The plot of Good Against Evil is structured all wrong. It starts out where Elyssa Davalos is the point-of-view character and fully half of the film is taken up by the romance as she is wooed and becomes involved with Dack Rambo. These scenes could play out like a standard romantic story but for the occasional appearance of Satanist Richard Lynch and seemingly sinister goings-on of his cult (little of which are made clear to us). Nothing much happens during this half. You keep waiting for the film to get through the romantic scenes and actually go somewhere.
Abruptly, about halfway through, Elyssa is taken off to New Orleans and then disappears off-stage for the rest of the film. Dack Rambo becomes the central character after he spots a newspaper headline and is inspired to go to New Orleans where with whopping coincidence it appears that the possessed girl is also daughter of his ex (a very young Kim Cattrall in about her second ever film role). I do have a believability issue about this whole plot line – Dack Rambo picks the newspaper out of a vending box on the street but since when do papers (in San Francisco) ever publish a front page headline about a child in New Orleans coming out of a coma and drawing an occult symbol that supposedly nobody recognises? When seen, the occult symbol turns out to be a no more than a garden variety pentacle.
It is after this point that Good Against Evil reveals itself as another copy of The Exorcist. From this point on, Elyssa Davalos is forgotten – she is mentioned and we do get some more of Satanist leader Richard Lynch but the focus in all on possessed girl Natasha Ryan. The scenes copying The Exorcist are fairly lame, even more so with this being a tv movie and The Exorcist’s shock tactics having to be tamed. Moreover, the film is shot on a low low-budget meaning that all we get is a rocking bed and loose items being flung about a room. The height of absurdity is the sight of priest Dan O’Herlihy pretending to by strangled by a pillow. The film also tries to make cats into sinister figures, which simply fails to come off.
Good Against Evil was also apparently made as the pilot for a tv series. This leaves you scratching your head wondering how what the continuing element in such a series would be. Is it meant to be Dack Rambo and his search for the missing Elyssa Davalos? Given that Rambo was a supporting character who is suddenly pushed into being the main character in the second story, this seems an odd promotion to the front line. Would it have been a series about him as an occult investigator uncovering new deviltry each week? Or would it have been a series about how Dack Rambo and Elyssa Davalos seek to reconnect to find their destined purpose to marry? I have a suspicion that network execs had the same confusions and that is why the series never went anywhere.
The script comes from Jimmy Sangster, one of the key writers at Hammer Films during the Anglo-horror cycle. Jimmy Sangster’s other genre scripts are:– X the Unknown (1956), The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), The Mummy (1959), The Brides of Dracula (1960), the psycho-thrillers A Taste of Fear/Scream of Fear (1961), Paranoiac (1963), Maniac (1963), Nightmare (1964), Hysteria (1965), The Nanny (1965) and Crescendo (1970), and Dracula – Prince of Darkness (1966), all for Hammer. Sangster’s non-Hammer scripts are the medical vampire film Blood of the Vampire (1958), the alien invasion film The Trollenberg Terror/The Crawling Eye (1958), Jack the Ripper (1959), the tv movie psycho-thrillers A Taste of Evil (1971) and Scream Pretty Peggy (1973), the Grand Guignol psycho-thriller Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972), the occult film The Legacy (1979), the spy tv movies Billion Dollar Threat (1979) and Once Upon a Spy (1980), the psycho-thriller Phobia (1980) and the story for Disney’s The Devil and Max Devlin (1981). As director, Sangster made three films:– The Horror of Frankenstein (1970), the lesbian vampire film Lust for a Vampire (1971) and the psycho-thriller Fear in the Night (1972), all at Hammer.
Full film available here