This is an updated version of a review that was originally published in Bleeding Skull! A 1990s Trash-Horror Odyssey.
I’ve spent a majority of my life hanging out in video stores. But by 2007, new video store memories were no longer being made. This once-essential component of American culture had disappeared. While some independent video stores still exist today, they’re not owned by chain-smoking jabronis who are surrounded by VHS tapes, nasty cologne, and stale popcorn. Those happy days are gone.
I think a lot about those analog palaces. I wish I could spend one more afternoon at T.J.’s Video in Glenwood, Illinois, or Showtime Video USA in Redding, California, agonizing over a decision to rent either Feeders or Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. It’s not a feeling of nostalgia—it’s recognizing happiness and wanting more. I’m guessing that filmmaker Jason Paul Collum feels the same way.
One-third of the 100-minute runtime of Mark of the Devil 666: The Moralist is devoted to documenting the day-to-day activities of Galaxy Video in Portage, Wisconsin. But this isn’t a documentary. It’s a SOV slasher with an identity crisis. And an editing crisis. And an unknown crisis that involves multi-layering the movie’s soundtrack at random with pocket-goth synth jams, thrash-metal wankery, dad-country snoozefests, and riot grrrl angst-blasts (“Don’t wake the baby, step on its fuckin’ head!”). This movie is a bloated, unyielding mess that rolls over you with the precision of a tank being driven by a gorilla. I would never be bored while watching a gorilla drive a tank. That’s probably why I was (almost) never bored while watching this movie.
Footage from a second-generation VHS dub of 1970’s Mark of the Devil is intercut with stills of thunderstorms, rainbow VCR dubbing lines, people walking on dark streets, and commercials that were taped by pointing a video camera at a TV screen. Then a killer wearing a fencing mask creeps around some bushes. This is the first 10 minutes of Mark of the Devil 666: The Moralist. Eventually, we end up at Galaxy Video. We stay here for a while. We see hundreds of tapes and posters for America’s Deadliest Home Video and Pumpkinhead II while a full trailer for Halloween II plays in the store. The owner is plagued by an unseen spirit and is decapitated by his own car trunk.
A haunted car trunk! I’m excited! But not for long.
Turns out, the car trunk wasn’t haunted. It was the killer in the fencing mask. He is knocking off people who he feels are menaces to society—prostitutes, drug dealers, and homosexuals. Two cops are on the case. One is a woman who rents The Slumber Party Massacre and Alice, Sweet Alice at Galaxy Video in hopes of finding clues. The other is a guy with a combination ponytail-mullet that defies logic. While the cops do their thing, which is nothing, we experience five-to-ten-minute sequences of people getting ready for dates, driving cars, and walking around in pitch-black houses. Scenes are intercut with shots of a static TV screen, which is used as a transition at least 300 times. Occasionally, the killer murders someone, and gore and blood are achieved with hamburger meat and Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup.
If Mark of the Devil 666: The Moralist were cut down to 70 minutes and its soundtrack were more gloomy synth pop and less local band agony, it would be one of the finest trash-horror experiments of the 1990s. That’s what this movie is—an experiment that was created for under $500.
While the movie’s structure is loosely tied to a slasher template, the experience of watching it is more in line with Twisted Issues, Charles Pinion’s seminal 1980s skatedoc- slasher. Mark of the Devil 666: The Moralist is a scrapbook that documents a small town in Wisconsin in 1995. Some sequences are literal home movies of kids trick-or-treating on Halloween night, complete with Midwestern mom commentary. Other scenes focus on a deranged subplot that involves a little kid who passed away from “complications due to AIDS.” This film was created because producer David Moore of Moore Video obtained the distribution rights to the original Mark of the Devil films, and the result is fascinating. But that’s not why it’s refreshing.
In the 1990s, Jason Paul Collum might have been the only openly gay filmmaker making SOV trash-horror films. This explains why we see gay porn magazines in a victim’s room, and why Collum cast himself as that victim. It also explains the discussion between two cops on whether or not the psychopath is only killing people because they’re gay. These are not details that you’d find in Killer Nerd or Die Hard Dracula. The gay themes are as much a call-to-arms for sexual liberation for Generation Xers as it is a touching snapshot of a young person coming to terms with his sexuality. That’s not to say that this was Collum’s intention—it clearly was not. But because these elements are here, the movie is more engaging than it would be if it were directed by someone other than Collum.
Also note that the back cover of the video reads, “Look for the CD soundtrack featuring winners of the 1994 Slammy Awards!”
