Cult Cinema: A Day of Judgment (1981) - Reviewed

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Images courtesy of Severin Films

Severin Films, in recent years, have been scouring the annals of regional midwestern small town American horror in search of films that didn’t necessarily work or garner widespread fame but nevertheless maintained a peculiarity and idiosyncrasy that separated themselves from the pack.  One such entry stemmed from part time actor and one-time director Charles Reynolds’ 1981 regional religious scare folk/slasher supernatural horror oddity A Day of Judgment (also known as Stormbringer), an offbeat period piece set in the 1920s South in a small town where the populace is drifting away from the church into vice and sin.  Produced and released by Earl Owensby Studios, a frequent purveyor of Southern regional exploitation horror fare, it was a microbudget, sometimes moody and spooky little number about a subset of lecherous characters who one by one are sent to Hell for their sinfulness by a cloaked figure with a scythe aka The Grim Reaper.    

 
A riff on The Seventh Seal by way of A Christmas Carol with the meat-and-potatoes aesthete of The Legend of Boggy Creek in between occasional innovative uses of lighting, A Day of Judgment opens on the elderly and beleaguered Reverend Cage (director Charles Reynolds) is on his way out of the town his church presided over for so many years after being ousted by the scummy local banker Mr. Sharpe (William T. Hicks) when he passes alongside a Grim Reaper figure on a covered bridge. 

From here, we then encounter more of the town’s wrongdoers: a spiteful old woman named Mrs. Fitch (Helene Tryon) who poisons the pet goat of some small poor children, a gas station owner named George Clay (William Gillespie) longing to escape the confines of the town and a young woman Missy (Inga Dennis) who is cheating on her elder husband with a younger man.  All of these characters will be judged accordingly by the arrival of the cloaked figure who with the wave of his hand either kills all human and animal life within reach or sends people spiraling directly into the inferno itself.

 
More oddball and sometimes funny than frightening but finding charm in its bizarre mixture of macabre and regional religious scares, A Day of Judgment feels like the occult horror companion piece to David Berlatsky’s The Farmer which also pitted postwar Americana against a ‘God to sort them all out’.  Featuring serviceable cinematography by Irl Dixon who would later work on Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives and a moody score by Dark Sunday composers Arthur and Clay Smith, the film looks fine though is largely shot at nighttime to take advantage of deep blue lighting with bright red eyes creeping up from behind a character towards the camera.  The ensemble cast is mostly fine with William T. Hicks as the oversized mercenary banker and Helene Tryon channeling Polly Holliday while Inga Dennis plays up the sex appeal factor.  Some of the set pieces of characters being dragged into Hell will remind of Poltergeist II or Drag Me to Hell though plainly hand painted pictures of the netherworld challenge our abilities to suspend our disbelief. 
 
Coming and going through drive-in venues and Thorn EMI VHS tapes, A Day of Judgment was the kind of film you happened upon after hours of walking up and down the horror aisle of your local Blockbuster Video.  In recent years, however, Severin Films have gone above and beyond the call of duty in terms of not only rescuing these obscure films from oblivion but publishing them in deluxe digitally restored editions replete with plentiful extras.  


Such was the case here with their new 2K scan of the interpositive and restored stereo audio.  There’s a seventeen-minute video essay by Stephen Thrower called The Atheist’s Sins about the slew of religious scare regional horror films throughout the sixties and seventies.  And there’s an interview with filmmaker Worth Keeter and writer Tom McIntyre the film’s screenwriter.  If you’re in search of something scary or remotely frightening, look elsewhere.  But if you get a kick out of regional homegrown horror with hokey effects and peculiarities, this will do nicely with a six pack and a hot-and-ready.

--Andrew Kotwicki