The first I ever heard of this movie was during the commentary for Vinegar Syndrome’s Beyond Dream’s Door (1988) last May when star Nick Baldasare mentioned it was coming out soon, and that it was a “lost film” of 80s Scream Queen Linnea Quigley. What?! Quigley has a “lost film?!” That was news to me. I stopped the commentary, grabbed a post-it and made a note of that. Afterwards I hit up IMDB and learned a little bit about it from the Trivia section. Interesting. I had forgotten all about it until a couple of months ago when news broke it was going to be released through Wild Eye Releasing’s sublabel, Visual Vengeance.
For those who didn’t experience growing up in the 80s, a term was coined for actresses who got popular being in horror/exploitation movies they were dubbed, “Scream Queens.” Three names come to mind when you say 80s Scream Queens: Jamie Lee Curtis, Barbara Crampton and Linnea Quigley. There were more, others will remember Brinke Stevens, Michelle Bauer and Felissa Rose. When I think of Quigley her two top flicks come to mind first: The Return Of The Living Dead (1985), where she played punk rocker Trash, and Night Of The Demons (1988), where she played Suzanne. There are two more movies I own of hers I also enjoy watching: Creepozoids (1987) and Sorority Babes In The Slimeball Bowl-A-Rama (1988). I noticed, though, I don’t own any movies of her post Sorority Babes, this made me check her resume, and it would appear she made most of her more well known flicks in the mid to late 80s. This flick here will be my first post Sorority Babes addition. Scream Queens were so popular in the 80s and 90s there was even a couple of magazines devoted to them: Scream Queens Illustrated (ran only 23 issues, I think) and Femme Fatales (ran a lot longer, 1992-2008).
This is a film I don’t normally gravitate towards, due to the absence of any supernatural elements. While watching this I decided to do a quick mental inventory of devil worshipping movies I own. I came up with The Devil’s Rain (1975), The Devil Rides Out (1968), Trick Or Treat (1986) and a DVD-R of a yet-to-get-any-kind-of-legit-disc release, Night Vision (1987). What all these have in common are devil worshipping elements, accentuated with the supernatural. What writer/director Eric Swelstad did was make a more realistic version of devil worshipping, nowadays the Satanists in this film are just stand-ins about the general lethality cults pose to society. But then again back in the 80s we had a preoccupation with Satanism and that’s what influenced Swelstad’s film. You don’t hear a lot about Satanists in the news these days, but you do hear a lot about dangerous right-wing religiosity, which to me teeters on cult mentality. Heartland Of Darkness brought to mind cult leader David Koresh, and you could say Reverend Donovan (Nick Baldasare) is this movie’s Koresh, though amped up on steroids, for Donovan does not give a fuck about keeping his evil nature on the downlow. You see, at some point, he came to Copperton, Ohio, and basically radicalized the townsfolk into being Satanists. Now, enter Paul Henson (Dino Tripodis) and his teenage daughter, Christine Henson (Sharon Klopfenstein). He was a big city reporter who got sick of the big city and decided to be one in small town Copperton instead by buying The Copperton Chronicle. And he’s just hired the paper’s only reporter (so far), Shannon Cornell (Shanna Thomas), who also has roots in the big city as a reporter and who’s also gotten sick of urban life. A match made in Heaven, me thinks, a relationship blossoms between the two.
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before, two ex-big time reporters and their Reverend friend walk into a cult owned town in the Midwest . .
So, while everything in the new career and life change department is going great, events are going to transpire that’ll probably have Paul thinking about moving back to the city, presuming he survives this small town cult horror he’s unwittingly walked into. Donovan’s sermons are . . . interesting, and in the beginning while Paul and Donovan’s interactions are kept to the minimum, that’s still more than enough for Paul to get a sense of the person he’s about to be dealing with, he refers to Donovan casually as a psycho early on while in conversation with a Reverend Kane (John Dunleavy). He’s the movie’s cult expert who comes in to help Paul, and for a while I kept thinking, okay, he looks like he might survive this movie, but then all that went down hill when he went to confront Donovan, and it was just the wrong time, the wrong vibe, and, well, yeah, he’s killed off.
Linnea Quigley plays Julia Francine, a high school teacher, if you can believe it. Shit, I never had teacher that looked as hot as that. She’s one of Donovan’s cult members whom he beds from time to time, and who shows off her magnificent tits in a couple of scenes. There’s no way you have Quigley in your film and keep her clothed, that would be sacrilegious, and thank God Swelstad didn’t do it here. And, yes, sadly, she does perish, when her seduction of Paul doesn’t work, and Donovan decides it’s time she meet her Satanic maker.
This is described as an ambitious movie in the Liner Notes, and they’re right, but Swelstad manages to pull it off enough that you don’t look to hard at the low-budget deficiencies. I mean, Donovan is just the tip of the iceberg here, his radicalized followers extend up the food chain to the Attorney General, but thankfully not the Governor, and that gets the poor man assassinated. Yeah, for a little bit I found myself watching a political cult thriller. That certainly is ambitious for a film that started out as a thesis project while being a student at The Ohio State University.
Besides just being impressed with the film overall, I was really impressed with the gore, and how realistic it looked. A couple of the bodies in the beginning are just gutted, and later on someone takes a shotgun blast to the face that looked very convincing. Donovan’s impalement death delivered the goods too. And was that a burnt baby corpse I saw? There’s a scene where Paul and Kane are looking for the spot down in this quarry where Donovan conducts his rituals and they stumble upon bones and other human carnage, and they mention babies were sacrificed, and I swear that was a burnt baby corpse I spotted mixed in with the bones.
I will spoil there’s a death of a main character that shocked the shit out of me, and it will you too. Despite that we get a somewhat upbeat ending; Donovan meets his maker, and Paul gets his daughter back, excluding the PTSD the two will be suffering from, they do survive to the end credits.
I’ve seen Baldasare before, in director Jay Woelfel’s debut trippy horror flick, Beyond Dream’s Door (1989), but in that he was the doomed protagonist, it was really weird seeing him play an outright evil fuck in this film. I’ll be honest, it was a shock to my system, but he did well, and I couldn’t wait till he got his ass iced. Woelfel makes a cameo in Heartland Of Darkness as a reporter, and he also composed the music. Baldasare is in another movie I’d like to see, They Bite (1996), but that one is still M.I.A. on legit disc due to it being in the ownership of a producer who’s “hard to deal with,” as I’ve been told.
Since Heartland Of Darkness (1989/2022) has been a lost film for more than three decades this blu-ray is it’s debut and comes courtesy of Wild Eye Releasing’s sublabel, Visual Vengeance! A sublabel designed to rescue obscure titles, mostly SOV. You can buy it now on Amazon!
Video/Audio/Subtitles: 1080p 1.33:1 High Definition Full Frame—2.0 English Dolby Digital (Stereo)—English subs only
I didn’t realize this movie was not SOV (Shot On Video) until I read the back of the case. It was shot on actual film stock. Quite frankly I was happy to see that, since I’m not a huge fan of video tape made movies, so whatever I thought of Heartland Of Darkness I wouldn’t have to also judge it by its videotape transfer. For me to overlook the videotape transfer a movie has to be really good in the editing, plotting and somewhat in the acting. Again, sounding like a broken record since I mentioned this in the previous three SOV movies I reviewed, Night Feeder (1988), had all that. It’s only sin being it was filmed on video tape, but that wasn’t a VV title, Bloody Muscle Body Builder In Hell (1995) was and that also had enough going for it in other departments where the videotape transfer wasn’t an issue. I’ve so far reviewed three of their movies, all SOV, and compared to them this 16mm film stock transfer was like seeing a Visual Vengeance title in UHD. Okay, maybe, that’s seriously overstating it, but the transfer looked good, and that was just due to the presence of my peepers beholding actual film stock.
Extras Included . . .
- Commentary With Director Eric Swelstad, Star Nick Baldasare, Cinematographer Scott Spears And Composer Jay Woelfel
Commentary With Tony Strauss Of Weng’s Chop Magazine - Deeper Into The Darkness: Behind-The-Scenes Documentary (38:39)
- Deeper Into The Darkness Trailer (:57)
- Linnea Quigley Remembers: 2021 Interview (5:52)
- Linnea Quigley—Vintage Local News Interview (19:43)
- Behind-The-Scenes Image Gallery (12:58)
- Heartland Of Darkness – Original Trailer 1 (1:42)
- Heartland Of Darkness – Original Trailer 2 (2:09)
- Complete Original “Fallen Angels” 1990 Workprint (36:59)
- Fallen Angels 1990 Workprint Commentary Track With Director Eric Swelstad
- The Making Of Fallen Angels – Vintage Cast & Crew Newscast Interviews (21:23)
- Fallen Angels Vintage TV Spot (1:17)
- Blood Church – Original Distributor Promotional Video (13:01)
- Behind-The-Scenes: Reverend Donovan’s Death (2:37)
- Fantasm Magazine Excerpt — Director Spotlight (4 pages)
- Video Vengeance Trailer (1:30)
- Six-Page Liner Notes
- Limited Edition Heartland Of Darkness “Prayer Cloth” – FIRST PRESSING ONLY
- Limited Edition Slipcase – FIRST PRESSING ONLY
- Collectible Linnea Quigley Folded Mini-Poster
- ‘Stick Your Own’ VHS Sticker Set
- Reversible Sleeve Featuring Original Blood Church Promotional Art
I like that you get three different cover arts for this release, and each one being impressive. The first two are 2022 custom art, but the period promotional art for when it was in its Blood Church title is very eye catching too.
As you can see there are a ton of extras, being a fan of fully loaded discs such as these it was fun to go through them, especially the period piece ones, but first and foremost, if you want to get a full accounting on the making of Heartland Of Darkness, as well as why it’s taken three decades to get released, you need to check out the Liner Notes, and then the cast and crew commentary. Earlier I mentioned the connection this flick has with Beyond Dream’s Door, specifically the sharing of the male lead and the director, who acted as composer on this one, but the connections are a lot deeper. Beyond Dream’s Door also started out as a student film at Ohio State University, and director Eric Swelstad was so inspired by it, he too decided to see if he could do the same and make a feature film. The inclusion of Woelfel and Baldasare’s on this film makes even more sense when you realize Swelstad was assistant director on Woelfel’s film, and these were the only two films to come from Ohio State’s film department. Fallen Angels was its original title and what it was shot under, but during the long post-production a TV show and a couple other movies came into existence with that same name, prompting Swelstad to re-title it. Why this took decades to complete was due to the budget Swelstad had to create for the film, it was too low, which means they were out of money and the film wasn’t done. In the meantime, re-shoots commenced and technologies came along that allowed him to insert some subtle digital effects, like rain, lightening, and an explosion they didn’t know how’d they’d create in 1989. The film was briefly retitled, Blood Church, back in the day when they thought they could get funding through this production company in Florida. Swelstad hated that title. I actually like it, but in retrospect it doesn’t accurately represent the film. Some of the same sets from Beyond Dream’s Door were used too (I thought that scene in the library looked familiar). The quarry was another shared location. By the way Woelfel and Baldasare’s 2017 horror flick, Asylum Of Darkness, (another Ohio lensed movie) will be getting a re-release from Wild Eye Releasing, with more extras and a commentary this time, from this very sublabel of theirs.
The documentary ‘Deeper Into The Darkness’ I highly recommend next. It’s a combination of period piece behind-the-scenes and modern day interviews with cast and crew.
‘Fallen Angels 1990 Workprint’ extra is basically a sizzle reel Swelstad put together months after completing shooting so he had something he could show investors as he searched for funds to complete the film; his accompanying commentary covers some of the same ground he did in the cast and crew talk on the completed version, but it’s still worth listening too, as there are new nuggets of info within.
Period piece behind-the-scene extras I always get a kick out of with these 80s movies, since that was one of my favorite decades growing up in, including the plethora of memory movies I have from it. For the period piece stuff I point you to ‘Linnea Quigley—Vintage Local News Interview,’ ‘The Making Of Fallen Angels – Vintage Cast & Crew Newscast Interviews,’ and the ‘Behind-The-Scenes: Reverend Donovan’s Death,’ as you get extended interviews with Quigley (Vintage Local News Interview, Making Of Fallen Angels) as well as the director and grip Marc Edward Heuck. Also check out the extensive Image Gallery for more behind-the-scenes photos from the shoot and just the late 80s in general.
This’ll be my second Visual Vengeance title I’ll be adding to my collection to go along with their Japanese horror flick, Bloody Muscle Body Builder In Hell (1995), and I’m looking forward to eventually seeing their Asylum Of Darkness next year, I’m guessing that might be the third Visual Vengeance flick to make my collection. I’ve become a fan of Woelfel and Baldasare ever since reviewing Vinegar Syndrome’s blu of Beyond Dream’s Door.
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