When people get stressed or anxious or depressed they reach for anything to alleviate the pain. Some grab a handful of pills. Others surrender to the pipe or a bottle. Some stretch for a loaded syringe. Or use an entire tube of glue for something other than model airplanes or Decoupage. A few might entertain licking a Sonoran Desert toad for a hallucinogenic kick. Or alleviate the pressure by beating their elderly parents mercilessly with a toilet tank lid. Different strokes for different dopes.
For me it’s a simple matter of opening a rickety step ladder, climbing to the top shelf of my Blu-ray and DVD collection and reaching for some crackpot classic. All my worries evaporate like tears on the hood of a hot car.
Now gather round, children. In ye olden days there were these structures that popped up all across the city called “video stores” which rented out all sorts of rancid flicks to undiscriminating individuals. Now I used to make a weekly trek across Manhattan scavenging through bins of used VHS and DVDs at these establishments. That’s where I probably picked up the straight-to-video 1991 film The Divine Enforcer, reading the back cover and chuckling at the concept of a movie about a vigilante priest. “Charles Bronson in a clerical collar,” I happily thought. But when I read the cast list I was completely sold. Erik Estrada, Jan-Michael Vincent, Judy Landers, Jim Brown and Don Stroud! Dear God! It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World– but for action junkies.
The star of the film is tall, ruggedly handsome Michael M. Foley, who studied Jiu-Jitsu, Karate and Kick-Boxing and actually survived acting alongside Jean-Claude Van Damme in Lionheart. Father Daniels (Foley) arrives at a parish in the roughest section of L.A. where crime, drugs, prostitution is rampant, not to mention a serial killer murdering women, draining them of their blood and stealing their skulls.
He is ushered into the house by the perky, ditsy, clean-freak housekeeper Merna (Judy Landers) who makes him take off his shoes at the door. He is introduced to the Monsignor (Erik Estrada of TV’s “CHiPs” fame) and Father “Ponch” warmly welcomes him, warning him that they have trouble keeping priests because of the high crime rate in the neighborhood. But Father Daniels has a tricked-out valise filled with “ninja stars” with crosses on them and a dagger shaped like a crucifix not to mention a gun with a cross on the handle.
In fact, Father “kick ass” gets most of his crime gossip from the confessional. He shows up at drug deals (with Jim Brown and square-jawed Robert Z’Dar) where he shoots, kicks and stabs the bad guys by warning them to “repent or pay the price.”
But into the confessional comes the L.A. vampire- Otis (Don Stroud) who taunts the Priest and excuses his killings on the fact that he has a rare blood disease and needs more and more blood to survive. Every scene with Don Stroud is so bonkers that your jaw unhinges. He delights in injecting syringes into the hookers he picks up then starts wildly sucking the blood out of their arms. One unfortunate woman escapes through the woods and he skips merrily after her. There are scenes in his dungeon where he even eats corn flakes out of his victim’s skull. In early films like Bloody Mama with Shelley Winters and Robert De Niro, Don Stroud stood out on screen as brutish and intense. Watch him in the underrated Canadian film The House by the Lake (aka Death Weekend) with the wonderful Brenda Vaccaro– he plays the leader of a gang who invades the house she is vacationing at and terrorizes her. He is absolutely riveting on screen- sexy and scary as hell. But here he is full tilt over-the-top as the crazed psycho. Hilariously so.
Poor doomed Jan-Michael Vincent shows up as another priest in the house- Father Thomas, and he looks pretty rough- it’s obvious he is reading dialogue that is probably taped on the newspaper he uses as a prop at the breakfast table. “Sometimes I wonder how God can allow such cruelty?” he says reading about another killing in the paper. “Men are cruel, not God,” Father Daniels corrects him. Mercifully he does get a good scene where he gets stabbed to death in the confessional by the psychotic Otis (Stroud– who actually strips naked in the booth when he kills).
There is also a young girl (Carrie Chambers) with a psychic “gift” of seeing prophetic flashes of events and especially the killings. Father Daniels demonstrates he has this second sight by tripping a purse snatcher without witnessing the crime then making the punk apologize to the elderly woman who responds with, “Fuck you- son of a bitch!” The movie is filled with scene after scene that defies logic and comprehension. My favorite kind of movie.
The film actually came out on Laser Disc at one time, and I got duped into purchasing a DVD from Germany (under the title The Deadly Avenger) that looks crummier than the copy you can easily find on YouTube.
“How can you enjoy a movie that is so bad?” a friend once asked me in utter seriousness. I feel so sorry for people who think like that. They will forever miss out on the great joy it is to watch an actor like Don Stroud chew the scenery in such memorably deranged ways in a movie as gloriously ludicrous as The Divine Enforcer.
“God forgives but I don’t,” states Father Daniels in this loony wonder.
Amen to that, Padre.
