Guyana, Cult of the Damned

            Out now in a gorgeous-looking Blu-ray from Code Red/Kino Lorber is Guyana, Cult of the Damned, a wonderfully sleazy 1979 film by Rene Cardona Jr. chronicling the Reverend Jim Jones and the mass suicide in South America.

            But hold on to your DVD from VCI if you have it (even though it looks crummy and is non-anamorphic). Because there are two separate movies. The DVD is the original director’s cut of the film. The Blu-ray is the more-widely seen Universal Studios re-edit, which added a voice-over of a person we never see in the film plus refigures certain scenes and edits the movie to a spare 90 minutes.

            Now a little about Rene Cardona Jr., the Sultan of Mexican sleaze and rip-off king. He was the one who rushed in when that Uruguayan rugby team crashed in the Andes in 1972 and was forced to eat dead passengers in order to live. A few years later he directed his movie about that- Survive! which was a box-office bonanza in grindhouses all over the world. It took 20 years for Hollywood to tell that story in Alive, Frank Marshall’s filmed version based on the best-selling book. Because of the success of Jaws, Cardona made Tinorera: Killer Shark in 1978, and in 1986- Treasure of the Amazon, his answer to Raiders of the Lost Ark.

            Exploitation films are notorious for riffing on tragedy. And hiring out-of-work elderly actors for cheap to pad their movies with “names.” Think about all the Patty Hearst and Charles Manson films. So, the Jim Jones tragedy was rife for cinema slumming. Stuart Whitman (always wearing sunglasses) is hilariously hammy as the Reverend Jim “Johnson,” and the film begins with him giving a paranoid rant on the pulpit in his huge San Francisco tabernacle. He is informing his devoted flock, who gave him all their worldly possessions, that they are all going to fly to a compound in South America which will be paradise on earth.

            As we flash forward to “Johnsontown” in Guyana we see that is not the case. The parishioners toil in the fields under the blinding sun and eat only rice and gravy. No one is allowed to have sex except Jim Johnson (Whitman) which he does often with various “chosen.” His on-hand doctor (Bradford Dillman) supplies him with massive amounts of drugs and is seen holding his hands on the bed, clearly implying a more sexually subservient position in Johnson’s life. Yvonne De Carlo plays Johnson’s long-suffering public relations woman who is worried about a congressman (Gene Barry) who is starting an investigation into “Johnsontown.” Joseph Cotten and John Ireland play lawyers sympathetic to Johnson.

            We also get to see, in lurid detail, the way Johnson punishes those who don’t tow the line. There are beatings in the fields for those who try to run away, and for three hungry children who sneak into the kitchen to steal food, they are trotted out in front of the congregation and their poor parents are encouraged to condemn them to punishment. One kid is thrown in a pit with snakes thrown on top of him. Another is tortured by being dunked repeatedly under water in a well. But the worst is a kid tied up nude who is zapped in his testicles with electrical current. 

            There is a scene where Johnson catches a young man and his girlfriend making love in the jungle. He parades them naked in front of the congregation and announces to the girl, “you will have sexual relations…with the man of my choice.” He calls out “Lazurus,” and a large black man moves out of the crowd, pulling off his shirt. Then Johnson turns on the young man, “you will perform the sex act with a man, and the entire community will be your witness!” which had them howling on 42^nd Street when I saw the film.

            The Universal version overdoes the voiceover to point out who the players are but also obscures the dialogue in scenes when the actors are having a conversation or Jim Johnston is going on with another crazy rant over the many speakers mounted throughout “Johnsontown.” 

            The finale when the Congressman (Barry) and reporters arrive in Guyana is very different in the director’s version. We get to see the photographers and newsmen at home with their families before their fateful trip, so the impact when Johnson’s people gun them down on the airstrip later has more impact. And the infamous “white night” where everyone is forced to drink the cyanide Kool-Aid is only accompanied by Johnson’s rants and Stuart Whitman really gets to go full-tilt hambone here. Bradford Dillman frantically dumping the white powder into jugs of drinks and devoted members squirting the cyanide-laced drink down the throats of babies is pretty horrifying. As is the recreation of the field of bodies all over the ground in the aftermath.

            Even poor Yvonne De Carlo meets a fateful end in a baffling murder by men with stockings on their heads who have already murdered her family. In the director’s cut a man blows his brains out at a press conference in the beginning of the film for no rhyme or reason. 

            But who care? It’s still a sleazy wonder no matter what version you watch. It also makes me sad that director Rene Cardona Jr. didn’t get to do an exploitation film about O.J. Simpson. What would he have titled it? “Juiced to Kill”?