NECROPOLIS

Directed by Bruce Hickey. United States. 1986.

Let’s not beat around the bush. Your enjoyment of NECROPOLIS will depend entirely on how attractive you find LeeAnne Baker. Lithe and tall, decked out in fishnets and leather, topped with an icy blonde pixie cut, Baker is every inch the 80s New Wave babe, all eyeshadow, red lipstick, and attitude. I’d say she’s the best thing this film has going for it, but truthfully, she’s the only thing it has going for it. The film lives and breathes by her performance, and unfortunately, that means it only sporadically shows signs of life.

If you find Baker’s performance as the evil Eva uneven, wait until you get a load of this film’s narrative logic. The best way to describe it is this: imagine a mass of pool noodles loosely taped together at random angles sat atop a nuclear-powered Sybian. This shit wobbles more than a drunk stroke victim in high heels.

We begin with a Satanic ritual in 1680s New Amsterdam. This is where we first meet Eva, who is either a witch, a succubus, or both, or neither. I have no idea. I’ll be saying that a lot. There are so many things I don’t understand. Eva, sporting a flowing blonde wig, does a little dance to initiate the dark rite before poking a children’s doll with a needle. This draws a woman named Dawn away from her in-progress wedding to Eva’s lair. Wasting no time, Eva slits Dawn’s throat and drinks her blood. This supposedly grants Eva and her small cadre of cultists eternal life.

But then Dawn’s husband, William, his former slave Henry, and a Priest enter Eva’s lair, shooting her cultist friends dead. Henry stabs Eva in the gut with a crucifix, mortally wounding her. In her last moments, she tells them that she will seek revenge. So much for eternal life, I guess. We abruptly cut to the modern day. Eva is now a motorcycle-riding punkette living in New York City. She turns up at a store, looking to buy her old magic Satan ring. The guy behind the counter tells her sorry, babe, but the ring was sold. This infuriates Eva. It was in the advertisement, man. How can it be sold out?

I used to work retail, and this scene absolutely cements Eva as a monster. The guy behind the counter doesn’t look like he has much going for him. He looks tired. He looks beat down. And in walks this moody bitch with her raccoon-looking eye makeup and bad attitude to give him shit because how dare they sell a ring to someone in a retail store that sells rings. Well, excuse me, your majesty. I should have known you, a stranger, were going to walk into my store 20 minutes before closing looking for an item that was on the front page of our advertisement. I’m so sorry. How could I have let that happen? And like your average customer who can’t get what they want, Eva decides to give him a massive migraine.

Only it’s a magic migraine. She uses a kind of hypnotic suggestion to give him extreme tinnitus. What a shitty way to die. Complained to death by an overbearing customer.

We cut to the local Neighborhood Center, where the good Reverend Henry helps junkies find their way. Eva walks into the men’s bathroom as Henry washes his hands. She’s crying, telling him that she’s being followed by a man claiming to be the devil. We now see what is happening here. Henry is the reincarnation of the slave that killed her. Eva is just another version of her old self… I think. Maybe she didn’t die. The film doesn’t say either way. I have no idea.

And I don’t think the film cares either, as we immediately cut from Eva and Henry in the bathroom to Eva dancing to a lame 80s pop song, sliding pantyhose over her long legs, and prettying up her lip liner. She heads out into the night on her motorcycle. Because she’s evil, she splits lanes the whole way. Eva finds the reincarnated Dawn working as a reporter. She’s currently interviewing Henry and one of his sad cases at the Neighborhood Center. Eva uses her dark magic to sabotage Dawn’s interview with the junkie, making the man spew homophobic slurs at Henry. F-bombs galore and not the fun kind.

Eva eventually gets her ring back after making the current owner (the reincarnation of the officiating priest) cut his own wrist. You know, what are the odds that all of these people lived, died, and were reincarnated in the same city? They all seem to reside within minutes of one another too. Dawn later says that reincarnation can affect groups of people. How many times have they all been friends before? Was Eva ever reincarnated as, like, a housewife or a schoolmarm, or is every version of her always evil? That’s if she even died in the intro. I still have no idea. How does this film know I like bitchy short-haired blondes in fishnets and short skirts? And why does it feel like I’ve been watching this 75-minute movie for the past four hours?

Watching NECROPOLIS feels like running in waist-deep oatmeal. It’s a total slog. Every once in a while, it does perk up a little. Eva takes her newfound Satan ring back to her old stomping grounds, reuniting with her old cultist friends, now reduced to gross, rotting zombies. Because the film is poorly made, this doesn’t definitively answer whether the whole ‘eternal life’ thing worked or not. She might have raised them from the dead, or they might have just been there the whole time. But if they were always there and had eternal life, why didn’t Eva? Or did she? If all the bad guys are immortal, why does Eva need to kill Dawn again to get eternal life again? Because that’s the whole point of the movie. Eva needs to kill Dawn so she can continue to live forever… I think? Can I get a Rhodes Scholar over here? Did Heidegger have anything to say about the metaphysics of NECROPOLIS? He probably didn’t even watch it. He’s smarter than I am.

Anyway, we meet the reincarnated William. This time around, he’s the only detective working in New York City. The actor playing him is doing a terrible Serpico impression. Because he was married to Dawn in his past life, he immediately falls in love with her here. As Eva leaves more and more bodies lying around, the triforce of good - William, Henry, and Dawn - begin remembering things about their past. Henry fills us in on seances, ectoplasm, reincarnations, and succubi. This is a Christian priest, by the way. The group concludes that the only way to stop this is to yadda yadda yadda. No one cares. This is the Eva show, goddamn it.

Eva seduces a guy and gets him so bricked up that he starts leaking KY Jelly from his wig. After branding him with her glowing Satan ring, she makes a lesbian pass at the girl he was with. Having done something to these people, Eva returns to her ghoul gang, sprouts four new breasts, and lets them suckle on her, feeding them her tit slime. Later, she manhandles some prostitutes and kills their pimp. I’m not sure why Eva doesn’t just kill Dawn already as she’s basically Jason Voorhees in thigh highs, but she instead decides to convince Henry’s assistant, Rosa, to shoot him. She kills herself instead. Lucky girl.

I don’t think I need to go any further with a synopsis. Dawn is kidnapped. There’s a fight. An ironic twist ending ensues. That ending raises even more questions about what the fuck ‘eternal life’ means in this movie, but considering the finale also includes a building inexplicably exploding and a woman being impaled by a limply thrown crucifix, asking any further questions would be pointless. I have no idea why witches are afraid of crosses in the first place. I thought that was vampires. Was Eva a vampire? Why did her victims start leaking lube? I also don’t understand what’s so special about eternal life if you’re going to get reincarnated over and over again. Just keep killing yourself until you get a good run. It works in roguelikes. I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work here. I have no idea.

I’m just gonna cross my fingers that I don’t find myself watching this shit again in the next life. If I did, I’d probably chew my tongue off and hard reset my existence.