The Believers (1987) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski) and Tuna |
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Scoop's notes Pretty strange horror film. It starts out with Martin Sheen crying over spilt milk. Literally. Of course that makes a lot more sense when you realize that his wife stepped in the milk as she was touching a shorted-out Mr. Coffee, causing her to get fried like a moth in a bug zapper. The film doesn't waste any time before getting to this. First, Martin Sheen jogs a bit through the opening credits. We hear some eerie music, although nothing eerie happens. It's just the milkman making his morning rounds. We wonder what the eerie music is for. Soon we realize that the seemingly benevolent milkman has delivered the instrument of death, the dreaded carton of half-and-half. Hey, everyone knows that stuff is dangerous. That's why I only drink 5/8ths-and-3/8ths. Anyway, the credits stop rolling, and ... zap ... the wife buys the farm. A dairy farm, to be specific. After this horrifying death, which is completely irrelevant to the rest of the film, Sheen does what I think any of us would do when confronted with agonizing grief. He moves himself and his son from Minneapolis to New York City. Mind you, he's a police psychologist. Maybe he thinks that mentally disturbed New York cops will make the wife's macabre death seem positively festive in comparison. I would have thought that the young son would be better off in tranquil Minneapolis, among his friends and familiar teachers and relatives, but I'm not a psychologist and Sheen is. Apparently there is no better therapy for a traumatized kid than to move him to The Big Apple and expose him to the stresses and terrors of policemen haunted by their very existence. It'll help toughen the kid up. Yeah, I know, it doesn't make a lot of sense. And I wasn't kidding about the irrelevance of that death. Neither the late wife nor the Minneapolis origin was ever used in the plot in any way. If the film had simply started with Sheen as a single parent living in New York, it would have been exactly the same film. Well, to be more precise, it would have been the same film without a woman getting bug-zapped, which I guess was an element of "foreboding." Personally, I advocate less foreboding and more afterboding. Maybe even some actual real-time boding. Anyway, the film centers around Santerķa, the Cuban-African spirit religion. Santerķa has kind of an interesting background in that it started as kind of a secret code used by certain slaves to continue their indigenous religion. They would pretend to be accepting Catholicism, thus pleasing their masters, and would seem to be devoutly inspired by the Catholic saints. In fact, the masters were amused that the simple Africans seemed to be more interested in the saints than in God. ("Santerķa" essentially means "saint-worship.") It turns out that the Africans weren't so simple. In fact, they were some cagey-ass motherfuckers who had figured out a way to worship their polygamous gods in the guise of Catholic saints, with each saint acting as a secret symbol for a specific god. That way the Africans were able to keep their own beliefs while mollifying their masters with their ostensible conversion to Catholicism. The bric-a-bric of the Santerķa mythology is quite cinematic, since it combines the colorful Catholic imagery of statues, candles, incense and rituals with all sorts of voodoo-type exotica involving colored beads, drums, tropical fruit, mysterious rituals, painted faces, sea shells, and animal sacrifice. Santerķa is exotic, but essentially benign unless you're a goat or a chicken, so the film's association with it was fundamentally window-dressing, designed to provide a colorful backdrop for the film and to show how the white people misunderstand and fear anything different. The real evil in the film comes from a secret "brujerķa" (witchcraft) cult spun off from Santerķa. These people are to Santerķa as satanists are to Christians. Yeah, I know that's kind of obscure and will not be grasped immediately, but that's the film's gimmick, for better or worse. The brujerķa advocates are into some bad-ass stuff like sacrificing humans, and watching Jeopardy re-runs when they already know all the questions. Apparently they worship both JoBu and Alex Trebek. One of their most powerful spells requires three young boys to be sacrificed by their own parents. They've already rubbed out two youngsters, but they're coming up empty-handed on number three. Say, guess who has just moved to town with his son. Be sure to word your guess in the form of a question. I'm pretty sure you can take it from there. It would seem that the sole power of this form of brujerķa is the Jedi mind trick. I'm not kidding. Not even a little bit. In a scene which seems to pay direct homage to Star Wars, the brujo smuggles a suitcase full of evil paraphernalia through U.S. customs with the following technique:
Structurally, The Believers is very similar to Rosemary's Baby, probably too similar in several ways which become more and more apparent as the plot unfolds. Apart from its obviously derivative nature, it is a moderately interesting "urban horror" film with a decent cast (Martin Sheen, Robert Loggia, Helen Shaver, Jimmy Smits) and some agreeably gaudy symbology. It earns its horror stripes less from tension or "jump" scares than from creepiness. It lingers on images like autopsies, or worms and bugs crawling out of people's skin and vital organs, or guys who can make their eyeballs disappear. It's tame, bland fare by today's jaded, post-Tarantino standards, but was probably considered fairly graphic in its day although, to tell ya the truth, I don't remember how it was received in 1987. I really don't really remember it at all. Rather surprisingly, two major talents were behind this movie. The Believers was directed by John Schlesinger of Midnight Cowboy and Marathon Man fame. The screenplay was written by Mark Frost, who also wrote what is probably my favorite sports book, The Greatest Game Ever Played. Those guys have each mastered other genres, but neither one of them seemed to be very comfortable in the milieu of horror films. With so much high-powered talent behind it, the film certainly can't be called incompetent, but it is nothing more than an OK time-killer. Most frustratingly it has one of those ambiguous post-resolution epilogues where you can't really figure out what it is all supposed to mean because it seems to be leaving room for a sequel which never materialized. Apart from that frustrating ending, it's the kind of film you can watch if it comes up on cable when you're in the mood for a movie, but not the kind of film you plan your schedule around. |
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Tuna's notes The Believers (1987) is a supernatural thriller set in that hotbed of the occult, New York City, starring Helen Shaver and Martin Sheen. Sheen loses his wife due to a freak electrical accident. He and his son move to New York, and their new landlady, Helen Shaver, finds them a housekeeper. Sheen and Shaver become an item. Turns out Sheen and his son are the target of a voodoo cult that believes in child sacrifice, and have selected Sheen's son for the honors. I can't give you many more plot details, because I found it totally unwatchable, and fast forwarded from one nude scene to the next. If you are a fan of "Cuban voodoo cults trying to sacrifice son of New York psychiatrist" films, you might enjoy it. Otherwise, avoid it. |
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