Necropolis

Necropolis

1986

Director- Bruce Hickey

Cast-  LeeAnne Baker, Michael Conte, Andrew Bausili, Jacquie Fitz, William K. Reed

           

     Eva (LeeAnne Baker sporting  white hair 30 years before The Witcher would make it cool) is a witch in Colonial New Amsterdam. She is conducting a Satanic ritual when she is attacked by a bunch of do-gooders. She tells them that she can’t be stopped and vows revenge.

           

     Fast forward a few hundred years and Eva is stalking the streets of New York. She is killing off people, most of whom have a connection to a local minister, Henry. Henry runs a program for local drug addicts. He gets them off of the streets, finds them jobs etc. As it turns out, Henry is the reincarnation of the man who attacked Eva those centuries before. Eva doesn’t just kill the people though. She gets into their heads and whispers their deep dark secrets to them, driving them to the pits of despair before they die.

            

     Two other people get drawn into the plot, Billy, a cop, and Dawn, a reporter. Both are investigating the string of deaths that seem connected. In addition to the deaths being connected, the bodies are also leaking ectoplasm (a fact that the medical examiner seems to be missing). Henry, in addition to being a preacher is also a bit of an occultist. He recognizes the ectoplasm for what it is, but doesn’t know why it’s there.

            

     Well as it turns out, Eva is draining her victims of their ectoplasm so that she can feed it to an army of ghouls that serve her. In the most memorable scene in the film, Eva grows 2 extra sets of breasts and begins lactating ectoplasm so that her ghouls can nurse off of her. Yep. You read that right.

            

     As crazy as this movie sounds, it’s not the weirdness or the horror that sells it; it’s LeeAnne Baker. She is awesome! She’s not just the villain, she’s the main character, and that’s rare. Oh, the villains may be the thing you remember about the film, but usually the protagonist, the person with the most screen time, is some final girl, often forgettable or at least overshadowed by the villain. Not so here.

           

 

     LeeAnne is so incredibly sexy and cool. She is like every MTV New Wave video you ever saw, boiled down to abstraction and then remolded into a pin-up. Everything about her is cool; fingerless gloves, patterned stockings, bold make up, riding a motorcycle with high heels. And the character has a real punk attitude. Her look and attitude have a lot in common with a porn star of that era, Lois Ayres, and given that this film came out at about the same time as Lois’ Devilin Miss Jones 3 and 4, I can’t help but wonder if one of these films influenced the other. Regardless, I don’t know why LeeAnne didn’t have a bigger career. She certainly had charisma.

           

     There aren’t, so far as I know, any great copies of the movie available. The only legit copy currently in print is being sold by Full Moon, and it looks like someone copied it off of a used VHS cassette. This movie probably isn’t popular enough to get a nice digital remastering, which is too bad. Oh well. This was a video store era film, so I guess it’s OK if it has video store era picture quality.

           

     Don’t watch if you want a sophisticated thriller. But if you want a bad ass sexy villain with attitude and some originality, you can’t go wrong with Necropolis.