teenage girl hanging Christmas lights from her porch is frightened by the sudden appearance of a long-horned goat. She screams and tries to get back into the house, but is kidnapped by the evil Reverend Salo Jr. (Lamberti).
A group of teenagers led by the brutal Luck (Lopes) escapes from a drug treatment center, killing a guard in the process. Munching down on hallucinogenic mushrooms, they plan to hook up with Rev. Salo Sr. (Kreskin), who had given them a demonstration of his mental powers just one day previously. They do not know that Salo's deranged son and daughter-in-law (Christie Sanford) are cultists who keep Salo's granddaughter, Grace (Mahon), a drugged prisoner in an upstairs room.
The goat likes to come into the house and stare at Grace. The younger Salo and his wife sometimes transform into floating red jack-o-lanterns, an evil miracle that prompts Luck to shoot them dead. The house is assaulted by predatory figures who resemble the zombies from Night of the Living Dead. A little girl with a face like something out of an anatomy textbook appears and disappears. One of the girls yells that this can't be happening.
In what is either a flashback or a ghostly visitation, the elder Salo tells Grace, "Your mother sold her soul to my son. She sold her soul." Pause. "How's school?"
Salo Sr. performs several routines from Kreskin's act, and a portrait of Salo transforms into a painting of the goat.
Luck spews red vomit not once but twice.
Grace is in the hospital. Her Dad whips a sheet away from her legs, revealing terrible burns. Luck is horrified. Salo Jr. sprouts fangs and bites a chunk of flesh off the back of Luck's neck. The goat wanders around some more. No explanation for any of this awaits anybody who makes it all the way to the end.
As if the goat had written the screenplay
Horror seems to pride itself on its arbitrariness. Certainly there's been no thought to developing the characters, giving them pasts or providing them with something to do other than scream or posture. The exposition is so fragmentary that, while we see that the teen gang is escaping from something, we won't be able to tell it's a drug treatment center unless we read the helpful explanation on the DVD box.
Some viewers explain the confusion by saying that everything that happens is a vision brought on by the hallucinogenic mushrooms. Some, including the genre critics excerpted on the DVD case, may say that the very randomness of these events is what gives Horror its nightmarish intensity.
But, you know, here's the thing. Nightmares feel as real as they do because you're asleep, and not capable of sustained analytical thought. You won't say "This is stupid" or "This makes no sense." Once you're awake, with a functioning consciousness, the very images that made your heart pound when you were in la-la land seem just silly and embarrassing. A movie entirely composed of such random nightmarish images, without any compelling narrative to ground it, is as unpersuasive to the intelligent waking mind as any number of bad dreams caused by a late-night sausage pizza. To provide thrills and chills and even scares, you need something more than nightmare logic; you need the one thing historically capable of making us believe in the unbelievable. That's known as a story. You need internal logic. You need characters worth caring about. You need a point.
Horror provides none of these. Instead, it has people turning to rotten corpses for no reason, a bludgeoning by shovel committed for no reason, a character who turns blue for no reason, zombies that appear and disappear for no reason, portraits that change facial expressions for no reason, a heroine who imagines torment on the rack for no reason and a woman in garish eyeshadow who cackles insanely for no reason while the TV in her room blares static for no reason. It has a convoluted structure that messes with sequence for no reason. It has regular visitations from a goat that, because of its long horns, is supposed to look satanic and evil and portentous for no reason, but that is instead just a goat. It's impossible to be any clearer about this. It's a goat. Oooooh.
The goat has one special moment that deserves mention, because it typifies the film's overall level of ineffectiveness. Early in the film, it enters the house that hosts most of the nonsensical mayhem. Projecting no aura of supernatural presence whatsoever, it wanders over to the foot of the stairs. There's a quick cut to a POV shot of something racing up those stairs at great speed, while an animalistic growl flares on the soundtrack. Then there's, I swear to God, another quick cut to the goat, still meandering about as lazily as it was before, except now on the first landing. Put those three shots together, and we the audience are clearly meant to buy into the pretense that the goat has just galloped up the stairs with evil intent. But let's be clear about this, too. While we can tell that this was the intended impression, there has never been any possibility of us actually buying into that impression. This goat didn't run anywhere, nor did it want to run anywhere. It wasn't in character and there was never any danger of it getting into character. It's a goat. Ooooooh.
The Amazing Kreskin is a well-known mentalist whose appearance in this awful film furthers the grand tradition begun when his predecessor Criswell made appearances in the awful films of Ed Wood. Between them, I'd take Criswell.
The DVD contains many extras, including an audio commentary from the director and a clip from his previous film Desecration, but really they amount to gilding a turd. Horror is horrible.
