Each week, The Exhibitionist comments on the latest news, trends and innovations related to the theater industry, or it discusses long-continuing problems with and complaints against cinemas in general, or it simply relates a specific moviegoing experience of yours truly. But rarely does this column get into the subject of actual movies. Well, seeing as there's not much new in the industry this week, and seeing as I'm fortunately not being dragged to see Sex and the City and therefore have no experience to relate about being a sole male in an auditorium packed with women, I figure this is a perfect time to bring up actual movies. Not just any movies, though: I'm presently only interested in discussing movies about, set in or prominently featuring movie theaters.

The earliest movie that I'm familiar with that significantly involves a theater is Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. The silent comedian plays a projectionist who falls asleep on the job then has a dream in which he literally climbs through the movie screen and into a detective film. A similar idea of breaking the boundary between auditorium and screen is used in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo and in John McTiernan's The Last Action Hero, both of which involve a movie character who manages to leave his respective film within the film. But nothing tops Keaton's screen-entering stunt, which utilizes special effects that still astonish more than 80 years later.

You know those big packs of 10, 50 or even 100 movies on DVD? They're usually packaged by genre (westerns, science fiction, horror, etc.) and priced so low you have to wonder how can these flicks be any good. The vast majority of these movies are in the public domain, and the DVDs are often mastered from an old VHS copy, so you're not going to get a pristine image, Dolby 5.0 sound or any extras to speak of. What you will get is a cluster of films that range from worthless junk to fascinating curio. Messiah of Evil is an obscure gem that falls into the latter category, and it's turned up on several of these collections including Chilling Classics 50 Movie Pack from Mill Creek Entertainment and the Tales of Terror 10 pack from Brentwood Home Video.

The film was originally released in 1973 under the title Dead People, and was subsequently known as Revenge of the Screaming Dead, The Second Coming and Return of the Living Dead. Despite that last retitling, there is of course no relation to the John Russo novel of the same name or the 1985 film that book eventually spawned. That version of the film did, however, swipe the tagline "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth," from George Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Once the lawyers got involved, the tagline was quickly dropped. Messiah of Evil appears to be the name the movie usually travels under these days.