Ritual of Evil (1970) **½
An underappreciated point about the made-for-TV movies of the 1970’s is that they, unlike their counterparts of the preceding decade, were produced on a series basis. ABC’s “Movie of the Week,” NBC’s “World Premiere Movie,” and “The New CBS Tuesday Night Movie” each put something new onto the screen week in and week out from September through April, year after year until audiences tired of the format. And while those programs could cheat a little by repackaging unsold pilots, their producers were kept as busy cranking out the airtime-filler as any sitcom or primetime drama showrunner. In that respect if no other, the weekly movie timeslots functioned like the prestige anthology shows of the 50’s, and I think that goes a long way toward explaining why sequels were so rare among 70’s telefilms, even when there was a chance to cash in on some truly stellar ratings. I mean, “The United States Steel Hour” didn’t do sequels, either. It’s therefore worth looking closely at the handful of telefilm sequels that do exist, to ask what warranted an exception to the rule.
Ritual of Evil’s situation is especially instructive, because it wasn’t intended to be a sequel at all. Rather, this film was made as the pilot for a regular series spun off from the previous season’s Fear No Evil. When NBC took a pass on the show, the pilot went back into the “World Premiere Movie” pipeline whence the premise and characters originally sprang. Comparing Ritual of Evil to its predecessor, we can see how producer David Levinson and writer Robert Presnell Jr. thought they should do things differently when consciously laying groundwork for an open-ended series, and the peculiar thing is that Levinson really did a better job by accident the first time around.
Aline Wiley (Asylum of Satan’s Carla Borelli) is a patient of psychiatrist and occult scholar Dr. David Sorrell (a returning Louis Jourdan). At the age of 24, Aline controls a considerable industrial fortune, thanks to the accidental deaths of her parents four years ago. She and her teenaged sister, Loey (Belinda Montgomery, from The Devil’s Daughter and The Todd Killings), have been left mostly to their own devices in the aftermath, and both of them have run pretty wild. The closest thing to a responsible adult in their lives is their fading playgirl aunt, Jolene (Anne Baxter), who can’t even be trusted to take responsibility over her own liquor cabinet. One miserable, stormy night, Sorrell receives an urgent summons to the Wiley mansion, but there’s no sign of Aline anywhere on the premises when he arrives. Jolene is much too drunk to be of any help, and all Loey knows is that her sister threw one hell of a party earlier in the evening.
The answers don’t start coming to light until the following morning, when folk singer Larry Richmond (Georg Stanford Brown, of Colossus: The Forbin Project), whom Aline had been allowing to live rent-free in the guest cottage perched along the same stretch of sea cliffs as the main residence, stumbles upon the girl’s bedraggled corpse while strolling the beach below. Richmond doesn’t do himself any favors by fleeing the scene and telling no one what he saw until after he’s picked up as a suspect by the Los Angeles County sheriff (prolific 70’s and 80’s cartoon voice actor Regis Cordic), but the truth is, he’d probably have been arrested anyway. As Larry himself observes under interrogation, it rarely goes well for a black guy to be seen in proximity to a dead white chick, regardless of the circumstances. Richmond’s legal peril is quickly dispelled, though, when the medical examiner finds Aline’s bloodstream positively filthy with barbiturates, and rules her death self-inflicted.
That news comes out during a gathering of the very same rich reprobates who were in attendance at Aline’s final soiree, to which Sorrell is belatedly invited after he arrives at the mansion to see how Loey is holding up. All in all, it’s a strange and unpleasant visit for the doctor. The whole situation is unsettling on a professional level, for one thing. Whatever else was wrong with Aline, nothing that emerged during Sorrell’s therapy sessions with her ever seemed to mark her as a suicide risk. As the dead girl’s shrink, Sorrell naturally wants to know how he could have missed a thing like that. Then David meets a couple of his deceased patient’s friends, and gets bad vibes from both of them. Edward Bolander (John McMartin), a longtime Wiley family hanger-on, has the air of an inveterate moocher, while professional photographer Leila Barton (Diana Hyland, from Hercules and the Princess of Troy) seems remarkably unruffled for someone who just learned that a close friend has taken her own life. But what really gets to Sorrell, given his paraprofessional interests, is a confession of sorts that he hears from Loey. The girl blames herself for Aline’s death, on the grounds that a few days earlier, she tried to get herself out of her older, prettier, more popular sister’s shadow with some kind of black magic conjuration. Naturally she didn’t mean for Aline to die, but everyone knows what a strong sense of ironic humor the Powers of Darkness have, right? When Sorrell asks how Loey acquired the knowledge necessary to perform such a feat, she tells him she got it from one of Aline’s books.
The picture grows darker still when Sorrell has a chat with Larry Richmond. The singer informs him that Aline frequently hosted dope-fueled orgies at the Wiley estate, not only with her regular circle of weirdo friends, but also with random hippies, freaks, and drifters whom she’d pick up off the street. And sometimes, she’d start those orgies off by leading her guests in various Satanic rites. Richmond went to a few of those parties, although his discomfort with swinging and his past experience with heroin always made him very reluctant to do so. In fact, he was there for the party immediately preceding Aline’s suicide, and he’s been having disturbing dreams about it ever since. They depict Aline leading her guests in the ritual murder of a beardy hippy (Richard Alan Knox) who had been her latest acquisition, but even that isn’t really the part that bothers Larry. What bothers him is that these dreams of human sacrifice have a quality similar to ones that he used to have in his smack-shooting days, which frequently turned out to be clouded memories of things he actually experienced while high out of his mind. And since nobody at the party even knew who Aline’s new pet was, Richmond is in no position to satisfy himself that the guy is still alive. What bothers Sorrell, meanwhile, is that Jolene was babbling about nightmares, too, during his emergency late-night house call at the mansion, and Richmond’s account could be taken to echo some of her disjointed rambling. Could she also have been too wasted to tell the difference between a bad dream and a half-recalled murder? Singer and psychiatrist arrange to meet again for a hypnotherapy session to establish once and for all how much reality lies in back of Larry’s nightmares.
In the meantime, Sorrell pays a visit to Leila Barton at her home/studio converted from a disused grocery store. Leila told David she had some problem that might benefit from a psychiatrist’s input, but in fact she just has the hots for him. Truth be told, David has at least a case of the warms for her, too, despite her openly professed lack of conscience and forthright self-identification as a witch, so it isn’t just concern for the Wiley sisters that leads him to see more of Leila going forward. That said, Sorrell doesn’t trust Barton very far at all, and one look around her living space is enough to tell us that he’s right not to. That’s because the statuette of Priapus that occupies the shelf above her bed (actually a statuette of Pan— but no way was an authentic Priapus idol making it past Standards and Pactices) is identical to the one that we keep seeing in intrusive extreme closeup whenever something weird is about to happen. And it pops up again as Loey now starts dreaming that she’s her own dead sister, engaging in the closest thing to a succession of perverse sexual scenarios that network censorship would allow in 1970.
That being so, it’s an obvious tactical error for Sorrell to mention to Leila his forthcoming date with Larry Richmond— and indeed Richmond inconveniently incinerates himself by smoking in bed the night before he was supposed to report to Sorrell’s practice. That turn of events alarms David sufficiently to divulge his mounting suspicions not only to the sheriff, but also to his mentor in the study of the black arts, Harry Snowden (Wilfred Hyde-White once again). The former bristles a bit at the suggestion of a Satanic murder in his jurisdiction with neither a corpus delicti nor even a missing person report to match, but he agrees to keep his ears open for word of any vanished hippies. Snowden, for his part, dives headlong into an investigation of all the local occult circles, and picks up the trail of a secretive outfit known as Capricorn, which is a bit like a Chamber of Commerce that takes its worship of Mammon literally. And would you believe that both Leila Barton and Edward Bolanger are known members?
Makes it all the more ominous, doesn’t it, that Bolanger now announces his engagement to marry Jolene Wiley? Granted, it was her idea, at least insofar as she was the one who did the proposing. But with someone as weak-willed and neurotic as Jolene, one always has to question whether they might have been subtly steered into any action they take. Loey certainly recognizes at once that Jolene, as her legal guardian for the next five or six years, is about as effective a chokepoint for control of the Wiley fortune as a grifter could hope to find. But if Edward really has been puppeteering all the diabolically driven misfortune surrounding the Wileys of late, he ought to consider how his fellow witches might view so slovenly a pursuit of so crassly venal a goal.
A curious feature of 1970’s detective shows is how often the villains were shitty, greedy rich people murdering their nominal loved ones in bids to become incrementally richer. That’s how Ritual of Evil works, too, and it’s almost certainly the kind of show that it would have been had it been picked up for series production. The difference, of course, would be that its shitty rich people preferred to conjure demons against their targets, rather than dosing their gin and tonics with rat poison. That’s not the worst hook for a TV show, and the implied continuation of both Leila Barton and Capricorn as sporadically recurring antagonists could have put the notional David Sorrell series rather ahead of its time in an era when even “The Fugitive” treated its famous One-Armed Man as more a looming offscreen presence than an active foe. Still, the very ubiquity of the amoral affluent as 70’s mystery-show baddies makes the ones in Ritual of Evil feel like a conceptual comedown after Fear No Evil’s devil-worshipping laser physicists. It’s practically inevitable that sequels and spinoffs lose a bit of freshness in comparison to their prototypes, but Ritual of Evil seems almost to be advertising its compatibility with stock primetime television storytelling formulas. And who knows? Given that network programming decision-makers, and not the viewing public, comprised the true target audience for TV pilots, maybe that’s exactly what Levinson and Presnell were trying to do.
Nor was it just the forces of darkness that got a makeover for Ritual of Evil. Dr. Sorrell himself has been re-characterized in subtle but significant ways. Most obviously, Presnell has written him, and Louis Jourdan plays him, as sort of a 1970’s update of the old Latin Lover trope once typified by Charles Boyer, readying Sorrell for sexual tension and/or short-term romantic entanglement with 20-odd future episodes’ worth of Babes of the Week. It works well enough, I suppose, but it represents another retreat into conventionality from the position staked out in the previous film. Sorrell was more interesting when his personal life was only faintly and fleetingly visible. Presnell made a serious mistake, too, reestablishing so bluntly the doctor’s dual status as a professional man of science and a skilled dabbler in the occult. Granted, some gesture in that direction was probably warranted, since you couldn’t count on anyone watching Ritual of Evil to have seen Fear No Evil in those days before the advent of VCRs. That’s no excuse, though, for how it comes out here, in a clunky slab of expository conversation between Sorrell and Snowden. The same goes for Presnell’s attempts to show Sorrell in action as a psychiatrist, which are never half as believable as their counterparts in this movie’s predecessor. Among the most laudable aspects of Fear No Evil was that it portrayed Sorrell as a good psychiatrist; in Ritual of Evil, he’s merely a glib one.
All that said, I do appreciate how Ritual of Evil combines its misbehaving rich folks with its youthful, hedonistic diabolists. Although there’s certainly no shortage of either in 1970’s genre cinema, those things normally reside far apart from each other. One, as I said, is primarily a mystery or suspense trope, while the other belongs to horror and sexploitation. One assumes stories grounded firmly in reality, while the other leans toward the fantastical, and often embraces it fully. Even the implicit political valences are opposed more often than not, with scheming accumulators of corrupt wealth representing the last important flowering of New Deal values in mainstream American pop culture, while devil-worshipping youth presage the reactionary turn that would rise to dominance in the 80’s. If Fear No Evil showed network television trying to come to terms with the success of Rosemary’s Baby, Ritual of Evil feels like an attempt to tame Manson panic in the same way. Robert Presnell Jr. didn’t know how to write an I Drink Your Blood or a Deathmaster (and it’s hard to imagine NBC ever airing one even if he had), so he mixed the California murder cult business with something else more in his comfort zone, and this is what came out.
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