Sometimes, a low budget look and feel can propel a horror film to great heights. After all, would The Texas Chainsaw Massacre be the masterpiece that it is now if it had a larger budget and cleaner sets? Of course not. But the low-budget approach doesn't always help a film. Sometimes, it can hurt it. Take Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz's Messiah of Evil, for example. It relies heavily on its low budget and cheap production values to create an atmosphere of dread. However, it fails to do so. It is the story of a young woman who goes to a strange town to investigate the disappearance of her father. There, she discovers that the townsfolk are under the spell of an undead member of the Donner Party which turns them into zombie/vampire hybrids at night. The film claims that it has a dream-like quality to it. But I think that they're using that excuse to cover up its poor pacing, shoddy framing, and occasionally indistinguishable audio. There are a couple of interesting scenes, particularly one where a woman is attacked and killed by a mob of zombie/vampires in a movie theater. It is heavily reminiscent of the schoolyard attack scene from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. But it isn't enough to save this mess of a film.
3/10
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