at long last
on 69K remastered Cerulean-Beam Diskette
Holly’s Secret Door
the lost film directed by Montalban Sigurnjak
rumored to be a hippie-dippie porno flick
turns out to be
a satisfyingly brutal Italian-style Western
our woman is Holly Colorado
an Annie Oakley-esque sharpshooter
whose entire family is killed by a rapacious gang led by a hulking, creepy Christian preacher-man with a hysterical televangelist's wig of jet black hair-more on that later
Holly's hiding in the treeline,
petrified as she's only ever shot deer and birds,
as Mom gets stripped and beaten by firelight,
Dad is told,
by our good Christian villain,
"Cut out your eyes of shame, sinner! For you have the covetousness of Lucifer!"
Dad is handed a big-ass knife.
A door bursts open to admit obliterating white light,
Four strangely-pitched gunshots
Dad and Mom each get two bullets to the head.
Holly only had four bullets left, it would seem.
Years pass,
our good Christian monster
is now a bald, bullet-headed 'mayor'
-a dictator, really-
of a prosperous, thoroughly corrupt boomtown
-haunted by that strange night
of four gunshots-
our Telly Savalas looking villain has traded his Jim Jones look for a Frontier Mussolini aesthetic, and he's got a private army of fashy, black leather rentboy mercenaries vibing all over his nuts, ready to commit all manner of atrocities in the name of His Baldness,
what we ultimately get
is a kind of inverse giallo
where we are rooting for the repeat killer
-Holly Colorado all grown up-
as Frontier Mussolini flails and froths and foams and fumes
as his boomtown
gets sniped all-too-shit
Holly's sure shot aim
tearing open old wounds and bitter rivalries
Episodic
sort of a dystopian Our Town
as every good citizen turns out to be a wife beater, a child molester, a rapist, a murderer, a genocidal invader, a white supremacist, a bootlicker, a quisling,
Holly’s learned her lesson from the past
so this time
Holly's brought enough ammunition for the whole family of fascism,
highlights include:
the pedo-pastor
who gets his hands shot off
before being ignited by a Molotov cocktail
the boomtown undertaker examining freshly killed mercenaries,
helpfully intoning,
"Looks like two shots to the head, each. Which makes this . . .Colorado-style shooting."
Snap zoom into Frontier Mussolini's glowering eyes.
Of course,
there's an uprising,
a half-dozen town whores, a Native American fugitive, a Black cowboy, and a quartet of hired gunslingers known as the Four Winds of Death
wage a raggedy insurgency,
which sparks off various sectarian hatreds,
all while Holly plays guerilla sniper,
striking and fading,
rinse and repeat
Frontier Mussolini gets shot numerous times in his thick torso, Peckinpah slow motion, raw liver squibs blasting off all over the place,
and then His Baldness's pampered wife throwing herself across his corpse in the town square,
presumably to preserve it from desecration,
but all she gets
for her trouble
is decapitation
by shovel.
It's all rather blunt and satisfying.
Repeated motif of a door opening
to admit a nuclear white light of death
every time Holly pulls the trigger
Deleted scene features Holly explaining to a stock whiskey priest how the killing begins inside her mind, and the shooting is merely a formality,
in the actual movie, she says little, is basically 'Annie Oakley-as-Grim-Reaper'
which I suppose is all-you-need.
Another deleted scene features Frontier Mussolini going berserk, beating the shit out of his loyal wife, and then breaking a bunch of shit inside his manor-a clear homage to Citizen Kane.
Yet another deleted scene features an alternate version of the killing of the pedo-pastor: he's strung up by the neck, shot repeatedly by Holly, writhing, gagging, lots of raw liver squibbing all over the camera.
Allegedly, there was even more footage of various atrocities, including what happened to Holly's two brothers and three sisters, but they all simply disappear from the movie as it currently exists. You get a couple of shots of fearful, young faces by firelight, and that's about it.
You got some podcast clown doing a commentary track. It’s fine. Basically, he's just telling you how cool the movie is as you watch it. Sure. Okay.
No interviews with cast or crew.
They all passed away awhile ago.
Yet the movie survives.
Thinks.
What if we spent all the money and research and development we devote to resurrecting obscure exploitation flicks to Discovering the Secret of Immortality?
Thinks.
Or would I prefer to be remembered by my works?
Thinks.
Yeah, I dunno.
The Cerulean-Beam Diskette tech's probably cheaper.
8 out of 10.
-in the end, Holly Colorado's face by the roaring firelight of the immolated Boomtown of Corruption,
eyes unblinking
as she beholds Frontier Mussolini's desecrated corpse strung up for all to see,
the stock whiskey priest
mostly absent from the final cut
offers blessings to those
"Who brought Righteous Fire to this Town of Iniquity!"
the town whores are line-dancing
the surviving gunslinger plays a fiddle
snap zoom into Holly’s placid, unblinking eyes,
freeze frame,
brief credits,
because this was one of those movies that had most of its credits at the beginning,
damn,
I didn't even talk about the terrific original score-
-October 2020-October 2021
