The Evil Clergyman

Lost until 2012 this Pulse Pounders (1988) segment is drastically better than the second released short Trancers: City of Lost Angels (1988) which was rather underwhelming.

The story is about Said Brady (played by Barbara Crampton) visiting her recently deceased lover's estate (played by Jeffrey Combs) where she is visited by a human faced rat and a dead priest who both have different intentions for her.

Production wise, the film looks good and takes place in (what I can only guess is Charles Band's) castle. The short is filled with a thick and moody atmosphere/soundtrack and very solid performances by the small, but great cast. The only critique I have is that I would've like to see this as a feature length adaptation instead of a 25-minute short (perhaps even directed by someone like Stuart Gordon even?).

7/10.

There's something inherently melancholic about watching a film that was never meant to be seen this way. "The Evil Clergyman" arrives not as a polished artifact but as a rescued relic, pulled from VHS obscurity and given new life through Full Moon's restoration efforts. The image quality betrays its tortured history; you can feel the decades pressing against every frame, the grain and murk lending an accidental authenticity to its Gothic pretensions. What we have here is a 1988 short film, originally conceived as part of Empire Pictures' ambitious anthology project, finally seeing the light of day in 2012 with new music and titles attempting to mask the wear and tear. It's a curiosity more than a triumph, but for devotees of HP Lovecraft adaptations and the Combs/Crampton pairing, there's enough macabre atmosphere to justify the resurrection.

Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton reunite with the sexual tension that made "Re-Animator" so deliriously transgressive, though here the context is less campy, more earnest in its Gothic melodrama. Combs plays the titular clergyman, a hanged priest cursed to haunt the castle where he once shared forbidden passion with Crampton's unnamed woman. His performance walks a fine line between seduction and menace, his gaunt features and piercing stare conveying both desire and damnation. Crampton, always a compelling presence, brings vulnerability and a kind of resigned fatalism to her role; she knows she shouldn't be here, knows what awaits her, yet she's drawn back to this place like a moth circling candlelight. Their chemistry remains palpable even through the technical limitations, their scenes together charged with an eroticism that director Charles Band leans into heavily. The late David Gale appears as a warning spirit, a previous victim of the clergyman's curse, and his brief screen time adds gravitas and a sense of tragic history to the proceedings.

The narrative structure is simple, almost skeletal. A woman returns to a haunted castle, encounters her dead lover's spirit, is warned by another ghost, and faces the inevitable consequences of lingering too long in a cursed space. Band directs with a focus on atmosphere over plot complexity, letting the confined setting, the shadowy corridors, and the oppressive silence do much of the work. The pacing is deliberate, occasionally sluggish, which works both for and against the film. On one hand, it allows dread to accumulate; on the other, at roughly 30 minutes, there's not much room for meandering, and some sequences feel stretched thin. The dialogue is sparse and serviceable, leaning on Lovecraftian themes of forbidden knowledge, sexual transgression, and cosmic punishment without achieving the author's dense, ornate prose style. The ending is appropriately bleak, offering no escape or redemption, which feels true to Lovecraft's worldview even if the execution lacks the punch it needs.

Visually, "The Evil Clergyman" is a mixed bag. The castle interiors are suitably Gothic, all stone walls and flickering torchlight, but the restored print can only do so much with the source material. Colors are muted, shadows swallow details, and there's a persistent softness to the image that robs some scenes of their intended impact. The new score, added during the 2012 restoration, attempts to fill the sonic void and provide modern production value, but it occasionally feels mismatched with the visuals, a 21st-century overlay on an 80s sensibility. Still, the overall aesthetic manages to evoke the kind of low-budget Gothic horror that Empire Pictures specialized in, a scrappy determination to conjure dread from limited resources. The body horror elements, a Lovecraft staple, make brief appearances with severed hands and spectral transformations, executed with practical effects that hold up better than CGI would have.

Thematically, the film wrestles with guilt, desire, and inescapable fate. The clergyman's curse binds him to the location of his sin, and his lover's return suggests a mutual inability to let go, even when letting go means survival. There's a nihilistic undertone, a sense that certain transgressions stain the soul permanently, that love and lust can become prisons as literal as castle walls. It's heady stuff, though the short runtime prevents deeper exploration. This feels like a fragment, a piece of a larger vision that never fully materialized, and that incompleteness hangs over the experience.

For Lovecraft purists and fans of the Re-Animator duo, "The Evil Clergyman" offers a fleeting but worthwhile glimpse of what might have been. It's not essential viewing, and its technical flaws are impossible to ignore, but there's a strange charm in its survival, a ghost story about a ghost story. It's best approached with tempered expectations, as a curiosity rather than a lost masterpiece, a brief detour into Gothic horror that rewards patience more than it dazzles.

Mrs. Brady (Barbara Crampton) meets her former landlady (Una Brandon-Jones) in her old house and asks to see her room one last time after her lover Jonathan (Jeffrey Combs) committed suicide. Jonathan was a priest that hanged himself when Mrs. Brady left him. Now she misses Jonathan and the forbidden sex with him. When she enters the room, she sees his ghost, the ghost of a clergyman (David Warner) that Jonathan killed and a rat-like demon with human face (David Gale) while she is tortured by memories and by the evil creatures.

"The Evil Clergyman" is an erotic and creepy short film that had been lost for many years and found in a VHS copy in 2012. The nightmarish atmosphere associated to the erotic scenes are amazing and work since Barbara Crampton is a very beautiful and sexy woman and actress. All the cast are inspired and deliver solid performances. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "O Clérigo do Mal" ("The Evil Clergyman")