David Wojnarowicz and Tommy Turner, “Where Evil Dwells” (1985)
Loosely based on an actual American court case in which 17 year old youth Ricky Kasso killed another teenage boy during an apparent Satanic ritual, this film is very unusual. There is a very loose and jerky narrative in which a ventriloquist’s dummy acquires a life of its own and either carries out its own murder projects or influences naive teenagers to gang up on lone innocents and rape or torture them in extreme ways. The film is silent save for a constant soundtrack of heavy rock / industrial music / screechy vocal babble (the end credits are accompanied by US singer Diamanda Galas’s distinctive glossolalic singing) that at times is deliberately sped up or slowed down to disorient viewers.
The hair-raising incidents don’t appear to have much in common other than that they’re performed by the same kids but Wojnarowicz and Turner might have had to compromise on the number of wannabe long-haired teenage serial nut-job actors and used some of the youngsters to perform different roles twice. The activities can be repugnant: in one scene, the kids throw a dead companion of theirs off the edge of a bridge onto traffic below them and in another, they are sitting around a camp-fire mutilating animals and beating up and killing a friend of theirs.
Watching the film the first time, I found the narrative jumpy but on second viewing, it started to make much more sense and I could see that beyond the violence and horror there is actually a moral message pointing to the hypocrisy of political, economic and cultural elites, the source of real evil, in our society who divide and rule the citizens and decree who is “evil” and who is not. There is a lot of jumpiness in the camera shots which viewers may not like. Editing looks adequate enough and one quite memorable section in the film’s first half (it can be seen on Youtube.com in two equal parts) is the juxtaposition of shots of a front-row rider’s viewpoint on a rollercoaster ride with shots of a man in a business suit with smoke and explosive flashes suggesting machine-gun fire coming out of his body. Throughout the film the rollercoaster sequences suggest rises and falls in people’s emotional states and scenes with a priest performing a ritual and a laughing business-man suggest that religion and the corporate world have a stake in encouraging and exploiting the youngsters in their debased behaviour.
Although less than half an hour long, the film does run out of puff in its second half, due perhaps to the relentless killing sprees in which the murderer or murderers have a particular taste in obtaining human eyeballs. There is satire in the film with Wojnarowicz perhaps taking the time to add private jokes: the ventriloquist’s dummy, exulting in the mayhem with his hammy raspy voice, is comic and sinister at once – he provides both relief from the violence and a commentary on it. There’s a hilarious part where a slob in something that might be a Roman-toga outfit gorges himself on rich food and flings it around and this might say something about the corruption and wastefulness of Western political and cultural elites. This impression is reinforced by the Satanic mass sacrifice ritual that follows into which shots of a laughing cigar-smoking corporate type are inserted. If you can grasp the symbolism in “Where Evil Dwells”, then you’ll find this superficially crude-looking effort a worthwhile watch.