February 27, 2005 by s.z.

Sunday Cinema

The concluding segment of the Subliminal Cinema chapter "Weird Sex: Making the Beast With Two Backs With the Beast With Two Backs" has been postponed until next week so that we may bring you the following test of the Emergency Rapture Network.

It was Saturday afternoon.  And what do we do on Saturday afternoons, when the sun is shining and the air is fresh and crisp?

We lie on the couch and watch TV. 

And that's what I was doing last Saturday.  However, I was finding it hard to settle on a program to watch.  I looked at the onscreen programming guide, and found nothing that sounded interesting.  So, using the remote, I started clicking through the 100 or so channels provided in our crappy cable company's "bronze package" and found nothing worth watching.  While doing so, I came across perhaps the greatest post-apocalyptic Christian snuff family film of all time.  Allow me to tell you more ...

So, like I said, I was channel surfing, and when I got to channel 14 (the UHF station that has recently devolved into the "the infomercial, shoddy home shopping, and 'Loretta Young Show' and 'Meet Corliss Archer" station"), I paused to watch a scene from what looked like a really bad '70's horror movie (just my kind of Saturday afternoon entertainment).  In the scene, a blonde woman and a young boy were shivering in terror in a rustic cabin while a couple of inbred degenerates try to break in.  The rustics finally got through the plywood door, all the while mumbling gleefully about cutting off the heads of the "Believers."

This didn't seem like one of the Friday the 13th movies, or even a Yugoslavian ripoff of a Friday the 13th movie, so I watched a little more while trying to figure out just what was going on.

So, the cherubic boy escapes out the back door and hides in a culvert.  His mother flees too, with the hicks in hot pursuit.  Then a menacing shadow of some kind of a monster (it resembles the shadow of the lobster monster from Teenager From Outer Space) attacks the female hick.  A rubber thing (maybe an old inner tube or something) smacks her.  And then we cut to brief scenes of an atomic bomb blast, a running herd of horses, and the image of the bomb blast superimposed on the horses (which is apparently meant to suggest that the woman reached sexual release as she was being slapped around by the monster) before being devoured.  We don't see the kid's mother again, so apparently she was eaten too.  The male member of the hick duo finds boy in his hiding place.

Since this plot seemed unfamiliar to me, I checked the onscreen cable guide for info regarding the program -- it seems that it was called "Family Theater," and was described as "religious programming."  It was about half over at that point.

Okay, I thought to myself, while this movie isn't much like "The Wonderful World of Disney" or "The Children's International Film Festival," which is the kind of family theater I grew up with, it's entertaining in its own horrifying way.  So, I stayed tuned for more.

After a dozen commercials, the movie resumes and we see that the boy is locked in a jail run by some guys in generic military uniforms livened up with yellow arm bands.  Also behind bars are a really annoying middleaged man, and a young woman with horrible '70s hair.  One soon realizes that the two inmates are "Believers" because they are dressed in linen car seat covers like the boy and his mother in the previous scenes (just cut a neck hole and two arm holes in a large pillow case and you too can be a post-apocalyptic Christian).

The bad guys want the annoying guy (David) to tell them where some Believer is hiding -- they say they will behead him if he doesn't cooperate.  He keeps asking the ceiling why God would allow such things to happen to him, and we really want God to reply, "Because you're so damned annoying!" 

The young woman (Leslie) is apparently being held on a charge failing to accept the Barcode of the Beast or somethingt.  I guess the kid is in jail because there's no day care after Armageddon.  

Anyway, while David spends his time by wrestling out loud with his conscience, Leslie tells the kid how cool Jesus is.  After she makes the boy a story book consisting of just of pages of blank sheets of construction paper (red represents sin, gold represents heaven, black represents more sin, etc.), she is taken to the guillotine -- and it's a far, far better thing she does than she has ever done before, if her her crappy story book is an example of the kind of stuff she has done before. At first her death is really traumatic, because when we saw the kid's balloon float heavenward we thought it was him who got beheaded.  But it turns out he just gave Leslie his balloon so she would have something to play with as she met Madame Guillotine.  Whew, it was Leslie who died horribly -- that's a relief!. 

But then, a couple of minutes later, the boy IS beheaded -- but it's okay, because he had accepted Jesus as his savior.  (Kids, being a martyr is fun!)

Then David is led to the guillotine, and the movie concludes on a happy note, because David has got to be the most annoying movie character I've seen in quite a while. The End.

But the fun isn't over yet, because our host for Family Classics, Dr. Bob Reccord, tells us that we should call his church and, at no obligation to ourselves, learn how we can be guillotined for Jesus.  (Or something -- I changed channels about then, and found some A&E program about prisons, which makes a cheery change from "Family Theater.")

**********

So, that was last week.  Now we come to yesterday, and again I I'm lying on the couch, flipping through the channels, and I happen upon another "Family Theater" movie (once again, I'm apparently joining it about halfway through). 

This one also features David, who apparently had his head glued back on after last week's flick.  He is accompanied by a different blonde woman and her teen daughter, Jodi --  neither of them have accepted Jesus.  It's still after the apocalypse, and David is on a mission from God (but not a good one, like in The Blues Brothers).  No, David's mission to take a transmitter to some Christians who are hiding in a cave above Hoover Dam (David, being an expert in '70s technology, is apparently the only one who can do it).

Oh, and the bad military guys with the yellow arm bands are back too, and their headquarters is right beneath the dam.  Their only goal is life is to locate David, since there's apparently not much else to do in this radioactive papiermache world.

David and the chicks are driving the van used in the McKenzie brothers film,The Mutants of 2051 A.D. ("I was the only one left on the planet after the holocaust, eh. The earth had been like dezvistated by nuclear war. Like Russia blew up the US and the US blew up Russia. There wasn't much to do. All the bowling alleys had been wrecked. So's I spent most of my time looking for beer.")  The bad guys are trying to track the van via radio waves (or something).

It turns out that some girl who had been carpooling with David is really working for the militia guys.  Oh, and her skin is now falling off because she has Omega Man syndrome.  (She gripes about how the Believers don't get the icky skin lesions, so maybe jealousy and/or a desire to learn the Christians' beauty secrets is behind the frantic search for David and his group.)  She quotes a scripture about where the vultures gather, there you will find the carcass -- it doesn't seem to relate to anything, so I guess she just does it to annoy her militia boss. 

But the bad guys are getting closer, so David comes up with a cunning plan.  By having the teen (Jodi) talk like a chipmunk on the radio, David lures the Judas and one of the head bad guys to a train track, where they are hit by a train.  Then vultures eat their flesh, as predicted in the Bible.

David takes the transmitter to the Believer Cave (unlike the Bat Cave, this one is just a cave).  The Believers are hanging out, singing hymns and stuff, but they don't seem very futuristic.  Jodi is so impressed with the singing that it causes her to gush about how Jesus really loves her -- apparently she is now saved.  However, her  mother refuses David's offer to let Jesus into her heart and David into her bed, so she presumably goes to hell, or gets eaten by vultures or something.

When David plugs the transmitter into the Christians' short wave radio, the group's rendition of "Onward, Christian Soldiers" causes sound waves which crack Hoover Dam.  Water pours downhill, and the model of bad guy headquarters starts to collapse.  The movie ends with a fairly long scene featuring an especially wimpy bad guy being crushed by the debris, and weeping in pain.  The End.

So, a family classic. (Dr. Bob was also back, but again I changed the channels before learning exactly how Jesus prevents radiation sores or vulture attacks.)

Anyway, I was so intrigued by these films that I did some research, and via End Times Movies, I learned that the film from last week was Image of the Beast, one of a series of post-apocalyptic Christian dramas made in the '70's and early '80's by Mark IV Productions.  (The series began with Thief in the Night, which was about what happens if you sleep through the rapture.)

And here's some of what I missed during the first half of the film:

Image of the Beast opens with a very much older Patty shrieking again, this time at Wenda's headless corpse. [...]

Patty continues to waver and weep, right up until she's strapped into the guillotine. As soon as she's secured, some heavenly judgement-or-other strikes, there's an earthquake, and the world in plunged into darkness. Thus begins the most horrifying sequence in the series, and absolutely the best piece of filmmaking.

The earth shakes, the ground splits, and everybody not strapped to a guillotine scatters. Patty tries to snag a passing guard, groaning "I'll take the mark! Give me the mark!" to no avail. Abandoned, Patty lies breathless in the pitch black aftermath of the earthquake, and the camera pulls back, slowly, to show a crack across the parking lot, ending just before the guillotine. This is a perfect, harrowing, quiet moment, and a beautiful one, worthy of some of the gothic Italian horror directors — certainly a Fulci, if not an Argento. The camera then switches between several close shots of Patty and the guillotine. Patty struggles to free herself, begins to get a belt loose, and then hears a sharp click. She gasps and tries harder to undo the strap, and we jump between her face from the blade's viewpoint, the blade from her viewpoint, the catch on the blade slipping gradually looser, and her fingers frantically working the buckle of the strap.

And then the blade falls and Patty screams "NEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!!!" one last time.

Exit Patty.

Geez, I can't believe I missed that!  What a great family movie moment that would have been.

(Oh, and from End Times Movies  I learned more about the monster that ate the woman.  It seems that it's based on Revelation 9:7-10, and was supposed to be a locust/horse/woman with a breastplate of iron and a tail like a scorpion.  Now it all makes sense!

I also learned that the movie from yesterday was The Prodigal Planet (the title apparently loosely stolen from Hal Lindsey's The Late, Great Planet Earth).

End Times Movies explains that David was saved from the guillotine by a convenient atomic bomb blast -- which was nice for him, but apparently gave the other survivors those gross festering wounds, and turned some of them into mutants.

This is the part I am really sorry to have missed:

The crew picks up a morose little mutant boy along the way who falls for Jodi, naturally, although not as hard as he falls for Jesus. The "Mutant Boy witnesses to Jodi" scene is almost the entire reason to watch the film, and it's priceless. I won't spoil it, save to let on that Mutant Boy uses his festering wounds as an evangelistic tool ....

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is family entertainment.

Besides finding the titles of the films, I uncovered some information about www.christian.films, the outfit which put together "Family Theater." It seems that they sell DVDs and videos of Christian films, such as the following:

M10.28

Released in 2000 by Lockhorn Limited

This drama is an intense discussion starter about three teenage girls who attend a party which turns out to be a nightmare! Viewer discretion is advised as this movie presents a very worldly atmosphere, a brief sequence in "hell", and is aimed at a secular audience or very lukewarm group. It will grab people's attention and bring a dose of reality to any viewer. Eternity is coming. You go to heaven or hell. Also, if there was ever such a thing as a "Christian" horror film, this is it.

Yeah, better scare those secular or lukewarm teens into Christianity before it's too late -- and besides, they need a dose of reality, as represented by "hell," to get their attention, so it's not like you're terrifying them without a good reason.

Anyway, the site indicates that ChristianFilms has a movie series on TV which features "the best Christian films ever made from the last 5 decades."  While the films are all packaged and ready to go, ChristianFilms is looking for church groups to sponsor the series locally so they can plug their own denomination.

And apparently that's where our friend Dr. Bob Reccord comes in.  It turns out that Dr. Bob is "the President of the North American Mission Board for the Southern Baptist Convention (NAMB)."  (Note: that's NAMB, not NAMBLA.)  Dr. Bob is a frequent guest on "The 700 Club" and the Focus on the Family radio show. 

And per Michael McManus, paid shill for the Bush Administration, Dr. Bob has missionaries reaching out to the lost souls in "such tough places as Manhattan and Chicago" -- and, based on his pitches on Channel 12, where I live (you will never find a more wrteched hive of Republicanism and religion, albeit not the Baptist kind, than where I live, so I can see why Dr. Bob is reaching out to us lost souls here). 

See, it turns out that Channel 12 is a part-time affiliate of "FamilyNetTV," which is run by the Southern Baptists ("FamilyNet is the entertainment and information television network dedicated to providing a reliable, safe viewing destination for today’s family. Owned and operated by the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, FamilyNet has award-winning programs for the entire family").  Their schedule indicates that Family Theatre "features the best of Christian movies including A Thief in the Night and The Hiding Place." Family Theatre plays Saturdays at 2:00 PM Eastern, Tuesdays at 4:00 AM Eastern, and Sundays at 3:00 AM Eastern.

I suggest that you visit the Family Net's handy "Where to Tune" guide, and learn how YOU can catch this fine family film series.  Then you can join me in watching it next time, when we might get treated to another Mark IV movie, and you can ensure that your children learn that unless they shape up, they will be eaten by a scorpion/horse, get the plague, or face the guillotine).
Or if you have other things to do Tuesdays at 4:00 AM Eastern, you can purchase the whole "Prophecy 4-pack," which includes A Thief in the Night, A Distant Thunder, Image of the Beast, and Prodigal Planet.  It's available from Armageddon Books, your one-stop shopping center for the Apocalypse, for just $99.95.

Oh, it seems that Amazon also has a few copies.  But as I look through the Amazon customer reviews of the films, I am beginning to suspect that they may not be appropriate for children.  For instance,Arvavh says:

I remember this movie as it came out in 1973,how could I ever forget it as it was also used in my church when I was a child as a so called "Witnessing tool" now as an adult I can see it for what it really was ...A scare tactic to get one to believe and if I didn't I would be "Left behind to go to hell". The tool worked as I would have panic attacks till I was the age of 36.

While Avah has now left Christianity, one can assume that she never allowed the bad guys to place the barcode "Mark of the Beast" on her hand, so all the trauma was worthwhile.

A Viewer, who titles his review "Enough to Scare the Crap out of you," writes:

I first saw this movie when I was attending a right-winged conservative Baptist private school. I can honestly say that this movie scared me for life, aside from making me a full believer in God and Jesus. This movie gave me nightmares for years, and I will probably never be able to watch it again.

Another success story!

Jonathan H. claims that the films will "scare the bejeezus out of you," but he doesn't seem to believe that's a good thing, religiously speaking:

Oh yes, rest assured, there will be nightmares. There will also be a turning away from religion, and probably therapy in later years. Ask anyone in Generation X who saw this as children, when we were bused to churches in large crowds. These 4 movies are one major reason for our "issues" as a generation. We all lived in constant fear of 5 things: the Rapture, the Russians, the vampires, the aliens, and nuclear annihilation in World War III.

Never having seen these films in my youth, I was only scared of Russians, vampires, aliens, nuclear annihilation, and going to hell, which was enough anxiety for a kid, I think.

Reviewer Kris A. says

I remember watching this as an edge-of-puberty 12 year old growing up in a large and fear-based Southern Baptist church. For one, this should have a rating of R for extreme gore, and is NOT suitable for children AT ALL. They used it as a teaching tool about the end times and the "mark of the beast". All I learned is that if you don't go to church, you might get your head chopped off in the guillotine (they love those guillotine shots). Heads will, and do, roll. For weeks I had to watch this series and couldn't look at a telephone pole or streelamp without having guillo-flashbacks. Traumatizing, and another reason they wonder why we don't go to church anymore.

Reviewer NIchtsein was also deeply impressed by these films:

My loving parents forced me to see this entire series at the impressionable age of 9. It is disturbing enough to see any sort of scary movie at that age, but to be told that what you are seeing is real and will happen at any moment...Let's just say I didn't sleep for months. Whenever my parents left the house without telling me beforehand, I would cower in the corner, fully convinced that I had missed the rapture and would now be forced to endure a world of giant locust-men, a sun that would scorch people with fire, man-eating vultures, bloody faced anarchists in black robes, and a government that wanted to decapitate me with a guillotine. On one such instance, I even got a buture knife from the kitchen and held it to my throat, wondering if I should kill myself in order to avoid the tribulation to come. My childhood exposure to these movies played no small role in the deep-seated loathing I have for Christianity today. I urge all well-intentioned but misguided Christian parents who have access to these movies: PLEASE DO NOT SHOW THESE MOVIES TO YOUR CHILDREN! To do so is child abuse.

Would Dr. Bob be a party to child abuse?  What would Pat Robertson and James Dobson say?

LotusScrum calls A Thief in the Night the "First Christian B Horror Movie," and gives it 5 stars.  He says:

It scared the (...) out of me back in the day as a kid but now its up there for me with "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", "Evil Dead" and "70's/80's Slashers"

Which is a great endorsement for a family film -- that is, if you usually let your tots watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre on Saturday afternoons.

You don't, you say?  And you think that Brent Bozell and his group would be flooding the FCC with emailed form complaints if any non-cable channel was airing Texas Chainsaw Massacre on Saturday afternoons as part of something called "Family Theater"?
Well, maybe we should all go to Brent's Parents Television Council site and file a complaint.  Except that it seems that all you can report is obscenity (material that incites you to lust, but has no redeeming artistic value, as determined by you) or indecency (material dealing with "sexual or excretory organs or activities.") 

So, it seems that there are no regulations that punish networks for airing creepy, sick, violent shows when children can see them.  Therefore, feel free to air Texas Chainsaw Massacre as part of any Family Theater presentations you might be planning for your own broadcast channel. 

As for me, I will try to set the VCR for 4:00 AM on Tuesday to see if I can catch the scene from Image of the Beast where the mutant boy uses his lesions as a witnessing tool.

3:10:45 AM