We first meet our anti-hero Simon (Andrew Prine), when he has to leave his home, a storm drainage, to avoid drowning due to a rain storm. He is quite unimpressed by the weather and rants directly into the camera, shouting at us of his magical powers and his grand destiny as a future god. Shortly thereafter, he is arrested for vagrancy.
His arrest turns out to be a very helpful thing for his career, since it is in his cell where he meets Turk (George Paulsin), a young casual prostitute, who is a true innocent (not to say The Fool) at heart. Turk is fascinated by the charismatic Simon and drags him to the daily party in the house of rich gay semi-decadent Hercules (Gerald York).
It is here where Simon takes two important steps on his way to godhood - he meets Linda (Brenda Scott, two-times ex-wife of Prine), the pill-popping daughter of the local DA, who falls for him as soon as she has set eyes on him and he starts selling amulets of dubious use to the party-goers.
Simon becomes a regular fixture at Hercules' parties, selling stuff and making Tarot readings. When one of his customers pays with a fraudulent cheque, Hercules provokes Simon into putting a curse on the man. Simon agrees if Hercules will carry half of the weight of the deed.
Then, with the help of Turk and the life of a poor innocent goat, Simon curses the man. Soon, his victim dies under somewhat strange circumstances - to my glee by daylight.
Afterwards things go a lot smoother for the magician. His business provides him with enough money to leave his drainage and rent a basement as living room and place for magical practices.
His next step on attaining his precious godhood is loading a magickal thingum with energy. His use of sex magick with Linda doesn't achieve the craved results, though. If we follow his thoughts, destiny has caught him in a trap: his love for the girl prevents him to correctly complete his working, while sex with someone he doesn't love wouldn't provide the proper amount of energy.
There is a another way to acquire the energy through more negative emotions. Turk helps him to talk an aging gay man into a ritual consisting of ritual (and mostly symbolic) violence against the poor guy, a method that finally works. Simon plans on doing a great working to be able to step through his magical mirror.
Unfortunately all his plans come to nought when Linda's Dad finally has enough of his daughter's obsession with this shady madman and pressures a narcotics cop into planting drugs in Simon's place. At least, Turk is able to warn Simon of the cops looking for him. The magician still misses the proper time for his working, though.
Two minor drug dealers persuade the irate Simon easily into doing a different kind of working altogether.
He sacrifices the narc cop to curse the whole higher echelon of the city. Soon, the place is nearly drowned by a torrent of rain and one by one high ranking officials are implicated in a large corruption scandal.
Of course, this kind of magick has its price.
This is a strange one. I don't know what drove TV director Bruce Kessler to make this film (a spell, perhaps?), but highly approve of the fact that he did.
On first glance, the movie has all the trappings of a typical occult scare exploitation flick of its era. It stands out against his peers through the way it treats its subject matter.
Firstly, there is the simple technical accomplishment to mention. This is a product of professional, sometimes even inventive film making that doesn't use a low budget as an excuse for static camera, bad sound and everything else we know from (and sometimes love about) classical exploitation.
The script is another reason for the effect the film has. At once more intelligent and actually slightly knowledgeable about the subject matter of the film, it never takes the easy road of making people black or white. There's a palpable sympathy for the countercultural characters like Simon or Turk, but neither are they treated as heroes that can do no wrong, nor are the "straights" depicted as evil to their bigot bones. Also very worth mentioning is the film's sense of humor, mostly discernable as slightly distant, slightly ironic view of the proceedings. I never had the feeling that it took itself all that seriously, although it evades the trap of low-brow comedy.
Lastly I have to talk about the wonderful performance of Andrew Prine as Simon. He portraits a deeply weird, amoral, self-ironic, delusional, sentimental and cynical man as well as one can wish for, never going so much over the top with it as to make Simon unrelatable or unlikable.
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