1986’s Necropolis should’ve become a cult classic years ago
Necropolis is a sleazy movie even by mid-eighties horror standards. It’s the kind of movie you really couldn’t make today without a lot of changes — ESPECIALLY its woefully insensitive dialogue.
But there’s more to Necropolis than the scintillating box art implies. It’s a film that incorporates a ton of elements from some far more famous and celebrated horror flicks. It has the religious guilt and scummy New York backdrop from Def By Temptation. It has the vulnerable victims with drug dependency and suicide ideation issues shtick from Elm Street 3. It has the time-leaping, out-of-body cat-and-mouse hook from Warlock. And it even has a female goth antagonist with a penchant for interpretive dance, just like Angela from Night of the Demons.
Ready for the plot twist? Necropolis actually came out before ANY of those other movies.
Maybe calling Necropolis an “influential” horror movie is giving it too much credit. But you can’t deny that it was touching upon a lot of stuff that future horror features would later latch onto. Now, whether or not the directors of some of those aforementioned films ever saw (or even heard of) Necropolis is anybody’s guess. But at least indirectly and coincidentally, Necropolis was a moderately ahead of its time flick. Which sounds like a backhanded compliment, but hear me out — we’re going to give this thing its long, long overdue praise in just a bit.
Right off the bat the title of the movie isn’t helping its Google rank. There’s at least a dozen other movies on IMDB with the exact same name (give or take a few accent marks) and it shares the subtitle with one of those god-awful Return of the Living Dead sequels from the aughties we agreed to never talk about again. It’s a movie that fermented in VHS purgatory forever and never really had a “rediscovery” like so many after-the-fact genre classics. Which raises the question: what exactly does Necropolis do differently (and perhaps even better) than its contemporaries?
When you delve into the secret brilliance of Necropolis, the conversation begins and ends with the performance of its lead actress. LeeAnne Baker rules the world as the feisty villainess Eva, sporting a look that’s sort of a combination of Helen Slater in The Legend of Billie Jean and every Sybil Danning role ever. She seems like she would’ve become a crypto-feminist, low-key genre anti-heroine icon years ago, and you kinda wonder why Baker herself never went on to full scream queen glory. There’s no denying she could’ve been on the same level as Linnea Quigley or Karen Black, but for whatever reason, it just never happened. Somebody ought to do a Searching for Sugar Man style documentary about her pronto.
So, the plot? Well, Baker’s character is a devil worshiping witch from the 1600s who is time-displaced because of some Satanic magic ritual and sure enough, she ends up as a pixie-cut-rocking biker chick in Ed Koch’s NYC — the real NYC, back when everything was all gritty and grimy and everybody wore extravagant eye shadow, especially the men.
Now, you really can’t have a horror-tinged Terminator variation without our heroic Kyle Reese counterpart. In Necropolis, we get it in the form of lead actor William K. Reed, who plays the spiritual ancestor of a 17th century witch hunter. And since “witch hunting” really wasn’t a job circa 1986, he’s doing the next best thing for a living … running a soup kitchen and rehabilitation center for drug users and sex trafficking victims? Huh. I did not expect that one.
Eva’s M.O. is pretty straight forward. Since she’s an evil succubus and all she has to prey upon the souls of the weak. But she doesn’t kill them directly, per se — like, she takes advantage of their insecurities and practically makes them kill themselves through some extreme psychological manipulation and gaslighting. This is probably the part of the movie that’s going to prove most offensive/insensitive to modern day viewers, since Eva uses some very disparaging terms to describe a gay prostitute and triggers like two or three suicidal people to off themselves. There’s even a scene where Eva seduces the girlfriend of a random pervert she killed on the city streets — not exactly the kind of thing you’re used to seeing in horror movies from the mid 1980s.
Oh, and speaking of soul stealing, we have GOT to talk about the, ahem, “special” effects in this movie. Now, normally when you have a succubus in a movie like this the director depicts the whole soul stealing trope with some sort of animation or light trickery — i.e., all of those deadly smooches in Lifeforce, for example. Well, in Necropolis, Eva steals her victims’ souls by making a clear, gummy ooze leak from their foreheads … which she then eats. The filmmakers definitely knew what they were doing here and exactly what the soul goo looked like — calling it “suggestive” is a shameful understatement.
And don’t think that’s the only time this movie merges sex and gross-out horror. At one point, Eva engages in a devil worship ritual which culminates in her developing four extra breasts and feeding a small softball team of robed Satanists. It’s outrageous stuff that straddles a narrow line between hilarious and genuinely unnerving — which, in a way, is the perfect description of this movie as a whole.
The ending is kinda predictable, but we do get a neat little last-second swerve that knocks the door wide open for Necropolis 2. Alas, we’re still waiting for a sequel 40 years later — which isn’t a bad idea at all, considering we’ve got TikTok and OnlyFans nowadays. A reboot where Eva eats racist incels she catfishes on Tinder? Yes, please.
The movie was helmed by a guy named Bruce Hickey, who also wrote the script. He’s got a fairly short resume on IMDB and I can’t say I’ve ever heard of anything else he’s ever worked on. You can pretty much extend that statement to virtually everybody else in the cast — sorry, but I’m just not familiar with anybody in this movie, and I run a freaking horror movie website.
Necropolis is still an obscurity, but it’s a little less obscure thanks to streaming platforms like Tubi and Full Moon’s proprietary service. There’s no guarantee you’ll like it, but it’s definitely something different and something sorta prescient, even if it goes about it in the scummiest way imaginable. It’s the kind of movie you watch at 1 in the morning on a Friday, preferably with a belly full of off-brand Mountain Dew.
Necropolis is unmistakably trash. But man, is it some immensely entertaining and enjoyable trash, at that.
