The “gruesome, nauseating, and reprehensible” zero-star movie Roger Ebert called “vile garbage”
Only 60 or so movies were ever awarded zero stars by Roger Ebert, and when you consider he estimated that he’d reviewed over 10,000 during the course of his career, it tells you all you ever needed to know about just how much he abhorred them with every fibre of his being.
To put that into perspective, out of every film he watched in a professional capacity, a measly 0.6% were determined as being so unfathomably dire that he couldn’t justify rating them on a scale that started at 0.5 and only went up to four. The legendary critic reserved a special place in hell for those zero-star monstrosities, and one of them left him feeling sick to his stomach.
By its very nature, exploitation cinema thrives on cashing in on real-life tragedies, horror stories, and shocking events, and in the subgenre’s golden period in the 1960s and 1970s, cheap and nasty schlockers barely even trying to pass themselves off as fictional features would arrive as quickly as possible after a headline-grabbing event that shocked a nation, or the entire planet, to its core.
The only surprise in 1979’s Guyana: Cult of the Damned is that it took so long, and even at that, ten months is hardly a lifetime. Writer and director René Cardona Jr’s movie tells the story of James Johnson, the figurehead of a spiritual movement who relocates to the titular country with his followers.
Dubbing his new paradise ‘Johnsontown’, a visit from a congressman named Lee O’Brien makes a visit, which culminates in not only his death, but the death of hundreds more after Johnson orders his disciples to commit mass cyanide-assisted suicide. It seems familiar, but it’s hard to put a finger on exactly which real-life event the filmmaker was exploiting, such was the artistic licence applied.
“Guyana: Cult of the Damned has crawled out from under a rock and into local theatres, and will do nicely as this week’s example of the depths to which people will plunge in search of a dollar,” Ebert wrote. “The movie is a gruesome version of the Jonestown massacre of 1978, so badly written and directed it illustrates a simple rule of movie exhibition: If a film is nauseating and reprehensible enough in the first place, it doesn’t matter how badly it’s made, people will go anyway.”
Cardona gets both barrels for making “a film that mixes fact, fiction, and speculation with complete indifference,” with his focus falling much more on schlock and awe than even bothering to shine a light on anything that went on in Jonestown other than the fact that a lot of people died. It happened less than a year previously, so it’s easy to understand why Ebert was so affronted by its existence.
Universal Pictures was in the firing line, too, with the critic questioning why a “reputable studio” would “pick up this vile garbage for national release.” To make money, obviously, but that didn’t cut it: “It exploits human suffering for profit,” he raged. “It is a geek show. Universal and its exhibitors should be ashamed.”
