Guru, The Mad Monk

Not enough madness or blood, or any tits, or anything such a title and poster would suggest--at least not for my discriminating scummy tastes.

Guru, The Mad Monk is exactly the sort of film Sandra Bernhard used to showcase on "Reel Wild Cinema" back in the Nineties — in condensed form, of course. Which, if it’s edited bigly, means the film becomes even shorter than its “just under one hour” runtime. And honestly, that’s probably all the screentime this thing deserves.

Oh, it’s bad. Neil Flanagan — who did some drag and starred in such illustrious silver-screen turdlings as Fleshpots of 42nd Street, and one of my personal favorites, Troma’s 1986 lost cultural artifact Hollywood Zap! (a gorgeously bizarre little coming-of-age and early-gender-identity-confusion-meets-video-game-hustling epic starring the late Ben Franke, Ivan E. Rothman — a Buddy Holly clone if there ever was one — and Porky’s own Claude Earl Jones, who licks some earlobe… so there) — shows up here like a man who wandered onto the wrong set and decided, “Eh, why not?”

This cheapjack, slightly nauseating (visually) little no-budget Troma-before-there-was-Troma micro-flick was shot in a church in Manhattan and looks every claustrophobic damn minute of it. Flanagan plays a Bishop or a Pope or something (okay, maybe not that), and some sniveling, driveling guy, Carl (Paul Lieber) who looks like a young David Hess (no offense to the memory of ol’ Dave) begs him to save his paramour, Nadja (Judith Israel) from certain death for witchcraft. I think. Hard to say. Padre is a raving Looney Tune, and does a sort of split-personality mirror routine that totally prefigures the birth of Travis Bickle — though Bickle was a lot more toned, dig?

That’s Flanagan — a.k.a. “Father Guru.”

Then there’s Lady “Neferatu,” Olga (Jaaqueline Webb), a vampiress who works with Big Gu to clean up the bodies after the beheadings… and most especially, you guessed it, kiddies: the ever-lovin’ BLOOD. (Unlike Udo Kier in the Dracula flick I just watched, I don’t suppose it has to be the blood of “wergins.”)

There are a few fair droplets of blood here and there — surprisingly more realistic than most of the grindhouse dreck from the Seventies (Snuff, Blood Sucking Freaks, "Three’s Company") — but there’s no sex. The acting, amazingly enough, is not more wooden than a stake of holly shoved into a blood-drinking fairy-tale ogress’s still-beating heart. But I don’t want to leave you thinking anything in here is actually worth watching.

But watch it if you must — if, like me, you’re a kind of cinema-going sadomasochist. I guarantee that an hour after it ends, you’ll be struggling to remember the salient plot points. And then struggling to understand why you’re wasting precious minutes from your ever-dwindling stock of days even trying to remember the salient plot points.

(And yes, they ripped the title from Rasputin, the Mad Monk. And they didn’t even hand out free Guru beards. Of course, Guru didn’t have a beard, but that’s beside the point, isn’t it?)

Andy Milligan made many exploitation shits — er, hits — like The Body Beneath, a film I have yet to see, but, as Cleavon Little said in Blazing Saddles, “I must! I must!” Saddles was about a hundred-and-forty times the movie this sub-par Mel Brooks-costumed (like they borrowed them from "When Things Were Rotten") stink-o-rama even dreams of being. Milligan and Flanagan — the latter having died of AIDS shortly after playing Grace E. Magno in Zap — were both well-known in the ultra-low-budget sleazoid cinema and underground gay scenes of the era, an era when NO ONE was coming out of their closet unless it was kicking and screaming.

Sadly, both men are long gone now, but they left behind such celluloid rinderpest as Guru, The Mad Monk — a movie about a vampire on a prison island, a psychotic priest, some snuffed folks, some blood… something, something… (I’m drawing a blank here.)

Okay, Sandra — you have my permission.

Get the scissors.

But on the other hand: the one-lung producers who made this thing may not have had talent or skill, but at least they had ingenuity, temerity, and big brass movie balls. And brother, that counts for something. Not being afraid to spill a little blood — or lose a little — on the way to the silver-scream dream.

Fin.

Guru the Mad Monk (1970) | Full Horror Film

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