Director William Girdler died tragically in a helicopter accident just before his ninth feature film, The Manitou, was released. This was a real loss, as Girdler had displayed authentic pulp auteur energy and a shameless sense of showmanship that made the mid-1970s B-movie world a lot cheerier, and surely would have served him well as the age of the blockbuster came on. The Manitou was supposed to be his arrival as a relatively high-profile filmmaker after an apprenticeship in quickie cash-ins, including horror movies like Abby (1974) and Grizzly (1976) and blaxploitation entries like Sheba, Baby (1975). An adaptation of Graham Masterson’s popular debut novel, The Manitou, like some other horror movies of the time, including The Omen films and The Sentinel (1977), takes a cue from the popularity of the era’s disaster films and trucks in a selection of old-timey movie faces for a bit of upscale lustre. The real pleasure to be had in The Manitou lies in its giddy blend of class and trashy zest. Tony Curtis plays Masterson’s recurring hero Harry Erskine, a waning hipster who’s settled for making a living as a tarot card reader for the lonely, wealthy old women of San Francisco.
Harry’s situation is only a step above that of Max Bialystock in The Producers (1968), giving the women a blend of roué flirtation and sympathetic attention in exchange for a barely concealed profit motive: “When you’re good to the spirits, you know, the spirits are always good to you.” Similar in tone to the opening of Family Plot, Hitchcock’s swan song from a couple of years earlier, Girdler’s depiction of Harry’s flimflam makes knowing fun of fake supernatural jazz before forcing him to deal with an outbreak of the real deal. Harry’s old flame Karen Tandy (Susan Strasberg) contacts him, looking for some friendly contact and support as she faces an operation to remove a fast-growing tumour that’s appeared on her neck. Jon Cedar, who co-wrote the script with Girdler and Thomas Pope, plays surgeon Jack Hughes, a senior member of staff at a downtown hospital, who deigns to remove Karen’s growth only to be compelled to cut himself with a scalpel just as he’s about to begin. As the mysterious growth, which in x-rays looks awfully like a foetus, grows ever larger at a frightening rate, Harry is horrified when one of his regular clients, Mrs Herz (Lurene Tuttle), is levitated and hurled down a flight of stairs by a paranormal force whilst reciting a mysterious, incomprehensible phrase all the while, a phrase Harry previously heard Karen murmur in her sleep.
Harry, shocked out of his cynical niche and becoming truly concerned for Karen, contacts his mentor in all things mystical, Amelia Crusoe (Stella Stevens), who with her husband MacArthur (Hugh Corcoran) runs an occult supply shop. They bring in another, stronger psychic, Mrs Karmann (Ann Sothern), for a séance: they manifest a terrifying visage that rises from the table, and a windstorm comes crashing through the windows. Chasing down a clue MacArthur finds in an old book on Native American lore, Harry visits the book’s author, Dr Snow (Burgess Meredith), and is eventually forced to recognise the bizarre truth: the growth on Karen is actually an ancient Medicine Man from a long-vanished tribe being reborn. Harry approaches a contemporary Medicine Man, John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara), the only man who might have the knowledge to take on the renascent sorcerer. John takes on the job but soon faces a realisation that terrifies even him: the enemy is Misquamacus (Felix Silla), an immensely powerful revenant determined to cycle through reincarnations until he become a universal force, and bent upon punishing the humans around him for causing him pain by bombarding him with x-rays.
The Manitou is so 1970s it should be made of polyester, yoking together some of the most fashionable themes in the decade’s bestseller terms, most saliently occultism, demonic possession, medical drama, and Native American angst. Girdler’s percolating interest in sociological shifts is also apparent. Where Grizzly portrayed old-school masculinity perturbed and fending off a nascent feminist spirit as Christopher George’s park ranger dealt with his spunky girlfriend, even as it built to a more overt depiction of its brutal hunt as Vietnam redux hinted at in its model Jaws (1975), The Manitou resolves with its heroine emerging as capable of duelling with eternals whilst her mate gets his bromance on with the cool Indian dude and strikes a blow for racial reconciliation, and even ruefully wishing he’d had a chance to find common ground with the heedlessly aggressive Misquimacus. The Manitou grows evermore outlandish, and rather than try to mediate the unlikely tale by playing it as deadly serious and pseudo-realistic as William Friedkin did on The Exorcist (1973), Girdler rides the weirdness with bright, rollicking enthusiasm. This proves a wise move, however, as The Manitou sustains a highwire act and cranks the narrative up from a deceptively slow and intimate start until he reaches an apogee of madcap action and imagery.
Moreover, The Manitou is actually scarcely more ridiculous than the likes of Poltergeist (1982) and any number of superhero movies; it’s just that it piles up ideas from unexpected directions without fear for life or limb. Nothing about this film should exist, and yet it does. The first act nonetheless plays out with patience as it wryly studies Harry’s facetious lifestyle, as the slick antihero goes through the motions of playing the effetely charming mystic for his needy clientele before hustling them out, cranking up the funk, and downing a few beers. Harry’s pretences to embodying the archetypal disco-age bachelor even as he’s obviously storming middle age are gently mocked before he reunites with Karen. Girdler offers a string of sarcastically perfect ‘70s romantic clichés, down to visits to sun-dappled public gardens and post-coital lounging before a blazing fireplace. Meanwhile Hughes stands up for the shiny technocracy and mortality-defying devices of modern medicine, with his array of fancy gadgets like lasers and computerised control systems, but he’s slowly driven to the wall by proliferating evidence something far beyond his purview is slowly destroying his hospital.
The bill for progress and affluence comes due as the incarnated spirit of an entirely different way of understanding the universe soon comes a-knocking. The Manitou fits in neatly with other films of the period like The White Buffalo, Orca (both 1977), Prophecy (1979), and Wolfen (1981) that strongly invoke Native American lore and the social and spiritual fallout of one civilisation crashing upon another. The narrative drains off some of the potential symbolic force of the resurging repressed as it’s made clear Misquamacus represents a Native American nation wiped out by its own evil rather than by the interloping white man, and happily promises punishment of everyone who dares to stand in his way, particularly John as he sides with the whites. But the movie does allow John Singing Rock to be blunt in expressing his interest in tribal rights and the lingering effect of dispossession: his initial meeting with Harry, who visits his small farm in South Dakota, sees him smouldering with radical anger and initially spurns Harry’s request, only to be won over by a mix of communal responsibility – the money Karen’s parents will pay can better his tribe’s fortunes – and personal feeling, as Harry impresses him with a show of angry devotion and perseverence. John schools Harry in the lore of the Manitou, a spiritual endowment which he insists every physical object in creation has, including not just humans and animals but also plants, rocks, even human-fashioned devices.
Meanwhile Girdler lets old pros like Sothern and the perpetual Meredith step in for some lessons in scenery chewing. Tuttle’s cameo, which sees her wizened, hobbling old crone suddenly breaking out in mad chanting and shamanic dance, is especially effective. Curtis’s shyster charm colliding with Ansara’s haughty rectitude makes for a fun double act, as their characters prove fast friends when plunged into a situation where they both find they have more guts than they thought. The degree of conviction Girdler extracts from Ansara, as he tries to look fierce and metaphysically powerful whilst clapping some bones together, is worthy of some sort of award. Strasberg, who knew her way around horror movies having appeared early in her screen career in the Hammer psychodrama Taste of Fear (1960), has a high old time as Karen shifts from sensitive heroine to croaky-voiced, mad-eyed interlocutor. Lalo Schifrin’s score comes on with grandiose, vaguely Native American strains, giving more epic lustre than the ropey special effects.
The Manitou really hits its stride once John begins the battle with Misquamacus in the hospital. The monstrous entity is born in an impressively bizarre sequence anticipating the perverted birth of The Brood (1979), as the impish figure of the Medicine Man wrestles his way out of the cocooning sheathe of skin on Karen’s back and slides out onto the floor, a dwarfish ball of menacing muscle caked in drying blood. There's a genuinely original and disquieting note here as the birth scene is also a kind of extraordinarily intimate rape, as the parasitic organism uses and discards Karen. Whilst the structural mimicry of The Exorcist continues as the heroes return for ever-more gruelling struggles with infesting evil, the climax is actually more like the great magic circle scene of The Devil Rides Out (1967) except inverted, as John tries to keep Misquamacus contained with a cordon of ceremonial dust, whilst the evil shaman bombards the heroes with a string of calamities. Earthquakes shake the building. A miniature ice-age grips an entire hospital floor, an unfortunate nurse frozen solid and decapitated. A male nurse is skinned alive and then resuscitated as a zombie. Karen’s room becomes a hovering, acausal pocket in deep space, with Lovecraftian monstrosities surging out of the dark. Hughes has his hand lunched on by a manifesting lizard-man spirit and is later blown to pieces by an energy surge.
Finally Misquamacus summons a great evil spirit from the depths of beyond to consume everything, whilst Harry realises that the electronic devices in the hospital might offer a particularly strong field of countering Manitous. The very end hits reaches at once riotously oddball and hugely entertaining as John’s attempt to focus the machine energy on the evil entities fail but a revived Karen, armed with the combined power of the machines and the greatest Manitou of all, love, battles the evil ones amidst with a barrage of psychedelic effects and bolts of energy fired from her hands, all whilst bare-breasted. What a place for a film that casually diagrams ‘70s American social shifts to end: victimised heroine who’s been through the experience of rape/birth suddenly emerging as pagan priestess and all-powerful embodiment of the cosmic feminine. Meanwhile Girdler could well have been offering his wry mission statement as a genre filmmaker through MacArthur as he picks up the pieces and decides, “From now on we just sell this stuff, we don’t do it.” Damn shame he didn’t get another chance to peddle his wares.
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