Like the Murphy's, I'm not bitter.
Obviously, the among-we of the cult film fraternity who have long lurked in the forgotten byways and murky back alleys of cinema history (HMMM... that's a very familiar turn of phrase) know of many an auteur of alchemy that most middle of the road cineastes would spurn and spit upon the name of had they but heard of them. Maybe that shows better judgement and taste, maybe it's snobbery. Maybe it's Maybelline. But Michael J. Murphy is one of those names that could certainly be described (or decried) as an acquired taste. And seeing his output given the descriptor of "micro-budget cinema" might well conjure up thoughts of backyard productions of the likes of more modern practitioners such as the Polonia brothers or Chris Seaver (creator of his own baffling 'cinematic universe' including the perplexing Teen Ape) but Murphy at the very least shot on film (generally 16mm) rather than video for the majority of his output; though I believe that some of his later end of career stuff may be on digital I'm nowhere near getting to those yet if I'm going to proceed at least roughly chronologically. Not that there's an imperative to or anything, I haven't started with the actual earliest artefacts from his extant output for the reason that the very earliest projects are non-extant or fragmentary and that didn't seem the best place to dive in. I'll come back to those later.
I first came across the name of Michael J. Murphy, the Merlin of Murlin (or Murlyn) Films and a veritable wizard of speed and time, in Creeping Flesh: The Horror Fantasy Film Book (a book fleetingly referred to by Murphy himself in one of the Blu-ray extras I've just been watching, enabling this timely addition). A tome from Headpress imprint Critical Vision containing a number of essays on such sundry subjects as the BBC classic 'A Ghost Story for Christmas' strand, the notorious Parky possessed by Pipes brilliance of Ghostwatch and Steve Coogan's affectionate Amicus/Tigon/Tyburn homage Dr Terrible's House of Horrible in its television section and tributes to relative silver screen obscurities like Alan Birkinshaw's Killer's Moon, the Pete 'n' Dud dud version of The Hound of the Baskervilles (such a comedown for Paul Morrissey after his superlative Frankenstein and Dracula films with the late Udo Kier) and Saxon Logan's Sleepwalker that I was gifted a long distant Christmas past (thanks, John!), 'twas in this latter section that much younger me espied a piece titled 'Looking for a Moment: the Unknown Cinema of Michael J. Murphy' penned by Darrell Burton. Burton focused in particular on two short-form pieces from Murphy, the 1982 double-hander of Invitation to Hell and its companion piece The Last Night, which were bundled together when they had been released (or perhaps escaped, like a crazed beast) onto VHS in the United Britain of Great Kingdom via Scorpio Video and in the Americanias by Mogul.
Ed Wood, Andy Milligan and Michael J. Murphy, as eternal a golden braid as Godel, Escher and Bach are in the orbits of their own spheres, truly should be carved into the emerald tablets of history as the Holy Trinity of the brilliantly inept but determined art creators. And there are a number of similarities betwixt the trio - not just the indefatigable underdogs creating genre filmmaking in the howling face of adversity and lack of money or some may cruelly say talent but also the detectable strain of kink (many will know of Ed Wood's penchant for crossdressing either from Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy or Tim Burton's biopic, Milligan's homosexuality and penchant for a walk on the seedier side of life was never kept secret; Murphy's movies certainly have a palpable homoerotic current [too blatant to call it an undercurrent] running through them as well). Murphy was and remains at least from my viewpoint the most obscure of the three; I was in my twenties by the time I first heard of him and it took until my forties before I actually got round to seeing any of his works, thanks to Powerhouse/Indicator's comprehensively curated Blu-ray box set Magic, Myth and Mutilation which collects pretty much everything that the man ever shot - even down to the couple of minutes' scraps from otherwise lost early films. It's a truly amazingly extensive overview of a single filmmaker's life collated into on box assembled with the kind of loving care that's usually reserved for the likes of legends such as Hitchcock or Pasolini, and upon finally getting my clammy hands upon it (another Christmas present: at this rate I think I associate Murphy and his oeuvre with the festive holiday season more than Frank Capra) one of the first things I wanted to check out was the short film that had intrigued me so many years earlier: Invitation to Hell.
Beginning with Murphy's seemingly favoured title sequence with lettering in a Celtic font over a flaming background, also used in 1980's rather good short The Cell (which really liked, but at a little under fifteen minutes I didn't think worth a review on its own; still, I can highly recommend it), we begin with a house in the country. Shot over a four or five day stint in a rented farm property deep in the wilds of Devon, the short starts with our protagonist Jacky (Becky Simpson, with amazingly early '80s hair) summoned to the isolated locale of Manor Farm in deepest darkest Mummerset for a reunion with old friend Laura (Murphy regular and producer on a number of his early efforts Caroline Aylward, here acting under the name of Catherine Rolands) and her husband Ed (Joseph Sheahan) who are throwing a fancy dress party much to the unprepared and uncostumed Jacky's chagrin. Supplied with a last minute Elsa Lanchester Bride of Frankenstein outfit by the accommodating vampiress-clad Laura (wearing the same black bob wig that Aylward sported in Murphy's Hellenic-set giallo short Death in the Family the previous year), Jacky joins in with the other revellers including one guest in a cheap plastic Halloween skull mask that is eerily evocative of my childhood trick or treating: just seeing it onscreen brought the smell of the cheap hot plastic pressing against my face and the bite of the elastic into the back of my head all rushing back.
"If you try to leave, he'll stop you."
The perils of Jacky in the wild, wild land of the yokel really begin - menacing and oppressive atmosphere from arrival notwithstanding, as it's the countryside isn't it, and one has to expect that kind of thing - when she's led outside the farmhouse to a burning pyre as part of some kind of Summerisle-on-Sea ritual and roofied by her hostess. Waking the morning after the night before, she finds that not only is she missing memory but has gained some suspicious scars on her inner thigh courtesy of her midnight tryst with daemonic forces beyond human understanding. So I suppose as well as the obvious Wicker Man (or perhaps the BBC's paganistic Play for Today Robin Redbreast, another tale of rural shamanic skullduggery; I suppose that film's karate-loving 'Rob'/Edgar could be compared with this piece's piece of countryside beefcake Maurice, both being under the control of outside forces) influence, we get a pinch of Rosemary's Baby added to the mix as well as a hint of Lovecraft.
Finding herself seemingly trapped with the more afraid than antagonistic Laura and Alan (who provides the warning about the unnamed "he" who just might walk between the rows and will definitely impede any attempts at egress) along with servant Tina (Tina Barnett) and farmhands Alan (Steven Longhurst) and the mute brute Maurice (Colin Efford), Jacky begins to panic and the apprehension isn't assuaged by the appearance of her boyfriend Rick (Russell Hall, another early Murphy regular who had appeared in the short films The Cell, Stay and Death in the Family before this, his screen swan song) who makes it clear that he hasn't only just arrived but has been on site all along. It probably isn't paranoia when it turns out then all your friends genuinely are part of a weird and eerie conspiracy involving and against you.
It slowly begins to dawn that whatever the state of Jacky and Rick's relationship, it hasn't progressed to the fully carnal stage and it's because of her being virgo intacta that marked her out as being the required participant in the ceremony. Whatever cthonic primordial force it is that haunts the land doesn't go for anyone else's sloppy seconds, I guess. But it's fine with possessing in turn first Alan to issue commands in a daemonic voice to Maurice (after Alan, whilst completely under his own aegis, admiringly observes Maurice pumping iron topless) and then the man mountain himself to kill off the farm's other denizens in a variety of ways including rolling up his erstwhile roommate-cum-lover and former possessee in a carpet and tossing him onto a fire, whereupon Alan rises like a revenant for revenge.
Over the brief span of forty-four minutes we get low budget thrills and chills, a smidge of homoeroticism, some damn effective gore and a great burned skellington / Grim Reaper taking names and tearing out still-beating hearts in the climax. What more could one ask, to be honest?
I have no idea how easy this is to access short of splashing out the full price for the Indicator set but being a bite-sized slice of folk horror with a nicely eerie, evocative and menacing synth score from Terence Mills makes this an ideal introduction for newbies and acolytes to the wild and wacky world of the Murphyverse. Something that I'd highly recommend to any and all other voyagers on the wyrd back roads of cult cinema.
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