Michael's Horror Lase-O-Rama: The Believers (1988(-ish?), HBO Video)

Source: LDDB.com

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Following the accidental death of his wife, Dr. Cal Jamison (Martin Sheen) moves to New York with his young son Chris. Dr. Jamison takes a job as a psychiatrist for the NYPD, listening to police officers unload their personal problems from his home office. Everything seems to be going as well as it possibly can, given the circumstances: Cal's making nice with the pretty superintendent across the street (Helen Shaver), their live-in housekeeper Carla (Carmen Ruiz) loves taking care of Chris, and his lawyer friend Marty (Richard Masur) is certain Cal will win an exceptionally large sum of money from his wrongful death lawsuit against the manufacturers of the coffee maker that electrocuted his wife.

All that comes crashing down when Cal is called in to talk to Tom Lopez (Jimmy Smits). Tom had gone undercover to investigate a group who practice Santeria, a transplanted Afro-Caribbean religion which uses animal sacrifice and blood rituals to both protect and harm. Tom was not as undercover as he thought: the group knocks him out and leaves him to awaken at the bloody site of a child sacrifice, minus his badge. Now in a psychiatric hospital, Tom is refusing to talk to anyone, certain that not only is his life forfeit whenever "they" choose to claim it, only death and destruction can come to anyone else who gets involved. One evening during a power outage, Tom breaks out of the hospital and goes on the run.

Cal begins working with Lt. McTaggert (Robert Loggia), who, at Cal's request, brings him in on a second child sacrifice discovered by NYPD. While McTaggert and his men look for Tom, Cal dives deeper into his research, learning more about Santeria and its practitioners. He meets with Oscar Sezine (Raúl Dávila), a New York-based author of an authoritative work on Santeria, who explains the practice of the religion as well as their beliefs. Sezine is insistent that Santeria does not involve itself with human sacrifice, but also admits that it did so in the past: whoever is behind the deaths is clearly not playing by the faith's modern interpretations.

As Cal digs deeper, he learns that the sacrifice of children always happens in threes, and his own son Chris is the third intended victim. But even with the help of family friends, the NYPD, and Sezine (who is a practicing priest of Santeria), the conspiracy goes deeper and further than Cal could have imagined. It turns out Tom was right: nothing can stop them, no one can help you, and they know who you are.

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I picked The Believers up on a whim since I collect horror films on LaserDisc, but aside from the back of the sleeve copy, I knew nothing about it. It jumped to the top of my to-be-watched list after reading Michael Weldon's enthusiastic recommendation of it in The Psychotronic Video Guide.

I could not be happier to have taken the plunge. The Believers is both an enjoyable movie and a great slice-of-life look at the Satanic Panic which swept the US in the 80's (not to mention a great view of New York from that era, where it was shot). While the story isn't original -- it's based on a thriller entitled The Religion by Nicholas Conde -- I have to give major props to Mark Frost's screenplay, which wastes none of its 114-minute running time. If Frost's name sounds familiar, it's because he later worked with David Lynch to help script and flesh out much of Twin Peaks.

He, uh, also wrote the 2005 Fantastic Four fantastic flop, but try not to hold that against him. He was young-ish and needed the money.

In any case, The Believers' pacing is excellent, and works like other paranoia-fueled thrillers such as Rosemary's Baby and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to really ratchet up the tension. Things happen on screen that feel like throw-away moments, only to have incredible significance later on. Nothing displays this better than one of the film's earliest scenes, where Martin Sheen comes home after a run and digs in the fridge for something to drink, only to spill milk all over the floor. Literally the entire rest of the film could not happen without that event, and yet at the time it happens, the viewer assumes it's just another day in the life of this man and his family.

To say the finale delivers a twist is probably unnecessary, since movies like this always seem to get one last crotch shot in on you, but I'll warn you anyway and you still won't see it coming.

Sheen absolutely carries this film with ability to swing between emotions, but the child playing his son (Harley Cross) meets him halfway every time they're on screen together. Having survived the death of a parent at a young age, I saw an awful lot of myself in this kid, and his mood swings, his morbid curiosities, and the other elements of his behavior could have been mirror images of my own morass of emotions at his age. Well done and well acted, Harley.

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Unfortunately, for as much as I enjoyed the film, this is a seriously bare-bones presentation on LaserDisc. Pressed on a single two-sided CLV disc is a 1.33:1 pan-and-scan version of the film, and nothing but. I mean that literally: there's no trailer, no closed captions, no digital audio track...the disc doesn't even have chapters encoded, so if you want to find a specific scene, you have to fast forward through everything like you were watching a VHS tape.

This isn't the only HBO Video release to lack even the most basic of LaserDisc features, but it's disappointing to think that this was all you got in exchange for your $39.99 in the late 80's. It's not like the format was new or anything either, HBO Video was apparently the equivalent of those fly-by-night DVD publishers who tout things like "Interactive Menus" and "Spanish Subtitles" on the back cover under 'Special Features'. I'd have thought HBO, being a premium cable channel, would have invested more in their home media presentations, but apparently that wasn't a big deal to them thirty years ago. At least the studio exec who suggesting adding the Beastie Boys to the soundtrack didn't get his way. Nothing wrong with the band, but this is not the kind of flick appropriate to their style or sound. Dodged a bullet there.

Aside from being a ludicrously lackluster offering on 'Disc, I still highly recommend The Believers to anyone who hasn't seen it. It's a thriller in the Hitchcock vein, where the audience is often just as in the dark as the protagonist despite being privy to more information than they are, and the blood and gore is shockingly effective for its minimalism. An effect where live spiders crawl out of an erupting boil on one unfortunate character's face loosened my jaw, I'm not going to lie.

Three and a half eyeballs rolled back in the head out of five.

Seen this one, @janenightshade? Any thoughts? :)