By Keri O’Shea
A couple of years back, Horror in Short ran a double-feature by the title of The Can-Cannibals; if you missed it and you have a soft spot for neo-grindhouse, then by all means, check it out here. The director of The Can-Cannibals, Matthew Ragsdale, has been busy since that time, and the film you’re about to see here – entitled Mass – was his entry into the much-feted ABCs of Death Part 2. Unfortunately the film wasn’t selected, but as there have been so many entrants for that prestigious compilation, a lot of the entrants now have big plans of their own. Watch this space for more on that…and onto the film itself.
Mass is, according to Ragsdale, inspired by ‘mondo cinema, Church of Satan footage and the fashion of Chelsea Wolfe’. My first thoughts when I watched this were, ‘This looks uncannily like the Satanic ritual footage from Faces of Death’, so I guess that would at least kind-of tick two of those boxes from the start. I’m a big fan of Chelsea Wolfe too, and absolutely adore Krist Mort’s photography so aesthetically, this film is great for me. Its premise is that a covert female cult who worship a female Deity are interrupted by a crazed Fundamentalist. This, folks, is Mass:
Password: mass
Mass from Matthew Ragsdale on Vimeo.
Although not a Satanic cult, this group of worshippers certainly have a dark occult vibe about them, with the veils and cowls going on; Ragsdale has stuck with the grainy 70s style of film, too, and here is looks pretty convincing. I felt like Mass wouldn’t look out of place on a grindhouse trailer reel, sandwiched between Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things and The Devil’s Rain, maybe. There’s also more of a film structure here in terms of a storyline, whereas the earlier films we featured felt a lot more like tasters of a film would could potentially follow. That said, I wanted to see more here – it did still have that taster-reel feel, and I’d love to see what would happen if that aesthetic and the subject matter were played out more fully (and yeah, I know for the purposes of the competition that couldn’t be – I’m talking generally, for future reference here).
Mass is a neat, aesthetically-pleasing film, and underground cults give good viewing. That is a truism. Now, I’d love to see these calling cards branch out into something more, so it’ll be interesting to see where the director goes from here. As for the new compilation project – currently under the working title World of Death – we hope to have more details on that in the near future…