Absolution (1978)

... aka: Anthony Shaffer's Absolution

... aka: Kokuhaku no wana (Confession Trap)

... aka: Murder by Confession

... aka: Syndernas förlåtelse (Remission of Sins)

Directed by:

Anthony Page

Richard Burton, during his late career dive into genre cinema that included roles in Bluebeard (1972), an Oscar-nominated turn in the psychological drama Equus (1977), the oft-ridiculed Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and The Medusa Touch (1978), headlines this forgotten British production as strict and joyless Father Goddard, teacher at the all-made Catholic boarding school St. Anthony's. During one of his classes, he brings up confession. Specifically, why having a partition / screen in between the priest and the confessor is important. First off, it provides anonymity for the confessor so that they're not intimidated when it comes to unveiling their most grievous sins. Second, sitting alone in the dark booth reminds the penitent that they are in fact confessing to God, not the priest. The priest is merely acting as an intermediary between sinner and God; a middle man that is bound by secrecy no matter what the confessed sin may be.

A student poses a hypothetical question: "Supposing I told the priest in confession who I was and where I lived and I've kidnapped someone and have him tied up in me basement... Could the priest pass it on to the police?" The by-the-Book Goddard tells him no. Absolutely not. The confessed sin can be the worst thing ever and still, "There are no circumstances where a priest can hand over information of this kind." Unfortunately for Goddard, some of his students are about to put this rule to the test.

Primary focus is put on two students in particular. Benjamin "Benjie" Stanfield (Dominic Guard) and Arthur Dyson (Dai Bradley). Benjie is one of Goddard's favorites and the embodiment of what he expects from his boys. He's bright, polite, well-kept, doesn't have a hair out of place and always seems to have the right answers in class. As a reward, he gets special treatment. Arthur is the polar opposite. He's unkempt, with a crooked tie and greasy hair, seems incapable of keeping his mouth shut to his own detriment and is pathological in his need for acceptance. However, try as he might, fitting in just isn't in the cards for him due to his abrasive, needy, pathetic personality. His trivial comments in class are a constant annoyance to Goddard, who isn't above humiliating him in front of his peers for a laugh. In a nod to how outmoded religious beliefs can be harmful, Goddard's even believes the boy being crippled and having to wear a leg brace is tangible proof that he's not favored in God's eyes.

Rounding out the primary cast is Scottish comedian / musician Billy Connolly as Blakey, a bearded, long-haired free spirit and drifter who shows up at the school looking for handyman work, only to be swiftly rejected by Goddard. That doesn't deter him from camping out in the nearby woods and breaking into the school to steal food and wine. Despite being a teacher's pet of sorts, Benjie starts sneaking away from the school late at night to hang out with him. He confesses he finds the clergy to be "swine" who have nothing better to do than try to make them feel guilty about everything and even makes an aside that he'd like to kill them. Blakey teaches him how to catch trout with his bare hands, sings and plays banjo for him and gives him whiskey.

Even though Blakey could be seen as a bad influence (and certainly would be viewed as such by the church), he represents something else entirely to Benjie: life possibilities apart from the church and their influence. The school is a prison. It's stifling, rule-oriented, limited and not so accepting of independent thought, while the woods are wide open and free. Benjie also knows he can't speak honestly at his school. Not really. One may be able to get some things off their chest at confession, but it's certainly not without a side of condemnation and judgment. With Blakey, he can say whatever he wants without such judgment. After all, if anyone's aware that they have no business critiquing others it's him. He steals, drinks, smokes weed and used to swindle money from people as a palm reader.

When Goddard finds out what Benjie has been up to he makes him promise that he'll never see Blakey again. Benjie, of course, doesn't comply. Instead, he concocts a bizarre plan to get revenge. Sensing (from all indications, rightfully) that Goddard is a repressed homosexual with less than wholesome and fatherly designs on him, Benjie confesses a made-up story that he had group sex with Blakey and his lady friend (Sharon Duce) in the woods. In retaliation, the outraged, perhaps mostly jealous, Goddard secretly sends cops to rough up Blakey, which turns Benjie's new friend against him. Goddard then punishes Benjie further by forcing him to clean and forbidding him to play sports for an entire semester, which only succeeds in further incensing him. What follows is a series of confessions which may or may not be true, and may or may not involve a murder as well as plans for additional murders.

While this is generally well-made and well-shot (by John Coquillon), and the performances from Burton, Guard and Bradley are impressive, I'm not sure this really works as a complete package. Slow to start, the film concentrates primarily on the rigidity of the church system and its effect on the central characters in the first hour before transitioning into more traditional mystery / thriller territory toward the end. The problem is that the character building and astute commentary in the build-up is far more interesting than the thriller aspects and succession of final reel plot twists, which come off as cheap and gimmicky when they finally do arrive. Some viewers won't be as bothered by that as I was. After all, the film has to build up to something. I just wish it had been something a little more thoughtful and a little less predictable.

The film was based on a script (originally conceived as a stage play called A Play with a Gypsy) by Anthony Shaffer, who had a pretty great track record at this point having already written Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), the acclaimed The Wicker Man (1973) and the classic mystery Sleuth (1974). While this is nowhere near the same standard of those three films, it's not bad either. Andrew Keir (Quatermass and the Pit), Brian Glover and Hilary Mason all show up in small roles.

In various stages of production for a number of years, this had difficulty securing financing. No major studio wanted to touch it (a financially apt decision it turns out as the film was not a box office success), so producer Elliott Kastner had to raise the funds himself. After completion, it ended up sitting in limbo for around three years before gaining a wide release in the UK and wasn't even screened theatrically in the U.S. until it was a decade old. The same year this was dumped in American theaters, it also made its home video debut courtesy of TransWorld and was quickly forgotten. Afterward, the film landed in the public domain, which resulted in a subpar, dark print filling out those cheap 50 movie multi DVD packs.

Absolution has been saved from an uncertain fate thanks to several recent releases, starting with the 2016 Kino Lorber Blu-ray, which is not an impeccable print but still leagues above the earlier full frame DVD presentations. In 2018, the UK label Powerhouse Films / Indicator also released it on BR with a host of extras, including interviews with Page, Guard and costume designer Anne Gainsford. Their release also includes a newly prepared director's cut of the film, which is actually ten minutes shorter than the theatrical release. I viewed Page's cut in its entirety and then skimmed through the longer one to watch the scenes that were trimmed and can confirm that the shorter cut does indeed play better. The major debit with it is that it unnecessarily neuters a key murder scene at the end.

★★1/2

Image of the Beast (1981)

... aka: Thief in the Night III: Image of the Beast, A

Directed by:

Donald W. Thompson

A THIEF IN THE NIGHT (1973) and A DISTANT THUNDER (1978) both centered around Patty Myers (Patty Dunning), a young woman trying to survive and maintain her faith in a post-Rapture world where all True Christians™ have been swept away to heaven, leaving behind only a motley assortment of non-Christians and pseudo-Christians who hadn't yet gotten around to letting Jesus fully into their heart. Denied immediate entry into heaven for daring to be inquisitive, and losing her devout husband and most of her friends in the process, Patty and the rest of humankind were then thrust into an end-times scenario that included the rise of the Antichrist, 1984-style mass brainwashing campaigns, resource hoarding, evil military forces roaming the streets determined to collect souls for Satan, a flurry of natural disasters involving storms, hurricanes, drought, floods, earthquakes and more. 

In this Godless new world, being a Christian, and thus refusing to be perma-stamped with a mark of the beast "identification" symbol on either the back of your hand or your forehead, is basically a death sentence. Thunder concluded with Patty and several of her uncooperative friends being kidnapped, blindfolded and led outside, where they were faced with the option of either renouncing their faith or losing their heads.

After several are executed, including her roommate, Patty is led to the guillotine and then given the ultimatum. Her now dark-sided "friends," Jerry (Thom Rachford + his fancy mustache), Diane (Maryann Rachford) and Sandy (Sandy Stevens), all of whom have betrayed her at least once previously, try to convince her to take the mark. Initially refusing to answer one way or another, Patty is strapped down but then gets scared and has a last second change of heart: "I want the mark! I want the mark!" But God has other plans. He causes the sky to grow dark, powerful winds to blow and the ground to crack wide open, sending the executioners scurrying. As opposed to allowing Patty to sell her soul for a few more years on Earth, God sends the guillotine blade down on her himself.

With our series heroine out of the way in the first ten minutes, we're then introduced to some new folks. Leslie (Wenda Shereos), who managed to escape her execution because of all of the chaos, ducks into an abandoned building, where she finds Kathy Taylor (Susan Plumb) and David Michaels (William Wellman Jr.) already hiding out. Kathy was a Sunday school teacher and computer analyst whose Christianier-than-her husband was raptured, leaving her to care for their "thwee"-year-old son, Billy. Leslie made the mistake of thinking that helping handicapped kids, believing in God and regularly attending church meant she was a good Christian. Wrong! "When we say I, I did this and I did that, like I did, well, it only proves that we left out the only thing that really matters!," she explains.

So let that be a lesson, folks. You're really just wasting your time being a halfway decent person who helps others and contributes positive things to society in your earthly existence. Might as well just be a lying, thieving, greedy, abusive, adulterous, murderous, kitten-kicking, puppy-punching, rainbow-hating asshole. None of it really matters so long as you let Jesus into your heart at some point!

Attempting to flee, David commandeers a jeep and the three speed through the country. Leslie ends up getting shot. Incorrectly thinking she's been killed, David drags her body off into the woods and leaves it. The following day, David and Kathy stumble across scruffy Reverend Michael Turner (co-writer / executive producer Russell S. Doughten Jr.). Now living the life of a hermit in an abandoned barn, Michael's been able to sustain himself all this time using just two hens for eggs, a goat for milk and an apple tree. Pretty well, too, I might add, considering the pot belly.

Other than the fact he also financed the film and likely wanted to be put front and center, Doughy is around mostly to cover the same ground that was already covered in the first two films. This time he provides new / additional information about the seven "Trumpet plagues" and makes outlandish and patently untrue claims like China having "200 million horses" (!) in the late 70s. (I actually looked this up and there were an estimated 11.5 million horses in China in the late 70s... but who's counting!) Doughten is also given a huge illustrated end times chart that covers an entire barn wall; pointing at various "facts" as he goes like some kind of mad professor. You ever see a movie about a schizophrenic where they cover entire rooms with drawings and photos and write a bunch of letters and numbers and math equations all over the place and then draw lines everywhere to connect everything? Yeah, that.

At this point in the film, we're three years into Tribulation. There's been a "one-world" global government firmly established and a singular "world church," described as a "sin-infested humanistic body" and compared to a "great prostitute" (as opposed to a terrible one?) by Rev. Turner. Saints are being killed and then resurrected by demonic possession. Christians are being executed all over the world at an alarming rate, which has driven most underground. Small factions of rebels still exist and "144,000 Israeli missionaries" are going around trying their best to save souls. I realize some of this sounds kind of amazing, but they don't actually show anything. This is information relayed to us via radio and TV broadcasts and endless babble.

This tries to get all early 80s high tech with talk of code-breaking, computers being the "new golden calf," creating counterfeit "marks" to fool authorities, passages from a book called "Computer Prophecies" and such. David (using the identity of dead U.N.I.T.E. guard "Pat Ryan") and Kathy (going by the name "Jodie") are able to integrate themselves back into society using their fake IDs and get involved with Jerry and Diane (uh oh), who now claim to belong to a top secret organization called Believers Underground Movement Squad, or B.U.M.S. (!) for short. Despite all that's been going on, dumbbell Kathy thinks UFOs (!) are responsible for the current state of the world. She also tries to hit on David and gets rejected when he tells her she should instead worry about "a relationship with Jesus Christ." In actuality, he hasn't been able to forget Leslie who, unbeknownst to him, actually survived her gunshot wound and has been nursed back to health by an old X-tian farm couple.

This is slightly better acted than the first two due to their casting of a couple of people who actually had prior acting experience. Wellman, son of Oscar-winning writer / director William A. Wellman (1938's A Star is Born), who'd done decidedly non-Christian film work (Macumba Love, Black Caesar, IT'S ALIVE...) up until now, is OK in the lead. Ditto for his two female co-stars and a couple of others. Still, it's not enough to elevate the film. If anything, this is actually worse than the first two. Scratch that, it is actually worse.

The first ten minutes are solid, including a surprisingly suspenseful guillotine scene, but the entire mid-section is one talky, preachy, proselytizing, dull, insufferable slog. What little bit of action there is here is horribly staged, the introduced tech elements, probably here to make this feel more brainy and "scientific" (fail), go absolutely nowhere and the human interest stories all fall flat. As for the "horrifying" end of the world stuff, it consists mainly of someone squirting red food coloring into a stream and stock footage of forest fires and atomic blasts. This even manages to throw in a giant insectoid monster but disappoints yet again by only showing its leg and then a shadow of said leg.

There's lots of batshit crazy conspiratorial talk that could only come from truly deranged minds, none funnier than the film theorizing that Satan will be teaming up with the United Nations and global corporations to send Russian military forces (!?) to defeat Israel (!) and then steal all of their oil (!!) That's especially hilarious considering American evangelicals, Putin, Israel and corporate interests are pretty much all aligned these days. And I seriously doubt the UN and Russia are going to be seeing eye to eye anytime soon, let alone conspiring together on something. And, naturally, this is all really the fault of "the Jews" for blindly worshiping and helping to facilitate the rise of the Antichrist. (Seeing the corporate fat cats and wholly-corrupt politicians the evangelical community has been bowing down to recently, I wouldn't be so sure of that!) The film then proclaims that the Jewish community will only realize the error of their ways as their "groaning spirits" are descending to hell to be tortured for the rest of eternity. Lovely.

So then it comes as no surprise that the big "guest star" here is former Hollywood "beefcake" actor Ty Hardin, whose career started to flounder shortly after his four seasons on the western Bronco (a gig he reportedly got from pal John Wayne pulling some strings for him) concluded. In the mid-70s when the film and TV offers were drying up, Hardin became heavily involved with radical right wing politics both as member of the militia group The Arizona Patriots, an Aryan Nation affiliate known for stockpiling illegal weapons and distributing anti-Semitic literature, and as an extremist fundamentalist preacher who - at one time - ran his own ministry and was sometimes featured on the Christian cable network TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Network).

Hardin (who passed away in 2017) used to have his own website / blog (since taken down, though archived), where he went on various bizarre rants. He called for an armed takeover of the government by “Christian patriots,” railed against “world globalists” and espoused views that were anti- government, immigrant, Catholic, Jew (referring to them as “sub-humans”), gay (he thought same sex unions would destroy “the sanctity of marriage” despite being married eight times himself) and black (he refused to refer to Barack Obama by name but instead as “our Black President”). I guess what I'm really trying to say is he fits right into this particular world in his brief role as a missionary giving a sermon in a papier-mâché cave.

Self-distributed on VHS by Mark IV Pictures Video in 1987 and now available on DVD and on numerous streaming services, this is 20 minutes longer than either of the previous entries, and it certainly feels it. The finale of the tetralogy was The Prodigal Planet (1983), which also stars Wellman, Thom Rachford and Thom Rachford's fancy mustache.

★