There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, your misplaced faith leaves you with nothing to be proud of…
Wholly Moses! (1980)
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Directed by: Gary Weis
Leave it to Hollywood to come up with an entirely new spin on the term, “the come to Jesus moment”:
It’s as old as the Dead Sea Scrolls: If something shows up on screens that folks like, you come in as quickly as possible with a derivative film to get some of that box office for yourself. And no one complains about how derisive any of these are, citing Oscar Wilde’s famous quote to justify the practice.
Except everyone gets that line wrong; the full quote attributed to Oscar Wilde actually reads, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”
And boy almighty, do we have that here before us…
We open out in the middle of the desert, where we find a group being shuffled onto a school bus with the name “Pilgrimage Tours” painted on the sides. The tour director (Charles Thomas Murphy) is getting everyone on the bus for a no-frills tour of the Holy Land. He nearly loses one, however, when the doors of the bus close on the straggler and nearly drag him down the road before they finally let him on.
Our nearly-lost sheep is Harvey Orchid (Dudley Moore), a miserable scholar of ancient languages, who’s taking the trip to get over his latest bad break-up. We find this out when his companion next to him on the bus, Zoey (Larraine Newman), introduces herself to him, and he unloads his backstory in the most cringe-inducing “meet-cute” ever committed to film.
At the next stop, when the tourists get out to stretch their legs, a wind picks up Zoey’s and blows it off her head. Zoey and Harvey go off to look for it, finding it inside a small cave. Also there are a number of clay jars, one of which contains an ancient scroll that they both look over.
Harvey recognizes the language as Aramaic, and begins to read it, at which point the film become a reenactment of what’s on the scroll, with Harvey providing narration along the way. The story’s set at the time discussed in Exodus when Pharaoh has decreed that the firstborn sons of slaves are to be killed, as we watch Moses released to float downstream to fulfil his destiny.
Along the way, Moses passes by another babe, Herschel, also being prepared for his trip downriver. He’s being cast off by his father, Hyssop (James Coco), who decides to sell himself into slavery of the family that picks up the child so that he’d still raise his son. At first, Hyssop tries to sell himself to a princess of Egypt, until he realizes that she picked up a different basket, before finding his castaway son in the hands of the Senmut, where he closes the deal.
The story picks up years later, when Herschel is now an adult (Moore), and is part of the family business, sculpting idols of gods to worship. His life as a commercial artist isn’t bad; he has Hyssop to serve him and does a decent business in the trade. But that gets thrown away soon after he meets Zarelda (Newman), a woman who wanders into his shop that he tries too hard to pick up.
After that, Herschel and Hyssop deliver idols to their customers, during which time he’s set upon by a bandit (William Watson) and nearly killed. With none of the gods he was delivering in his cart willing to protect him, Herschel becomes an atheist, and sets off with Hyssop to Goshen to make a new start. He bumbles into the position of stargazer to the Pharaoh, not being bright enough to avoid such a fate.
His luck gets worse when he predicts for his young boss (Jeffrey Jacquet) a victory in the upcoming battle with the Hittites. Of course it goes wrong, and Herschel finds himself in trouble at the battle’s end:
Fearing Pharaoh’s wrath, he starts to wander the desert, all alone except for a chance encounter with Shadrach (Dom DeLuise):
Ultimately, he makes it to the tent of Joseph of Median (Richard B. Shull), who is eager to marry of his daughters. As it happens, one of them happens to be Zarelda, and Hershel is now part of the family. Which, yes, makes him Moses’ brother-in-law.
This sets up the pivotal point in this otherwise worthless tale: We have Herschel overhearing the conversation Moses has with Yahweh (voiced by Walter Edmiston). From this point on, Herschel tries to take up the holy task that he thinks he’s been given, without realizing that as always, he’s just following in Moses’ wake.
Speaking of wakes, this film was dead on arrival. The producers Freddie Fields and David Begelman, were the founders of CMA, the agency that pioneered film packaging. If you’re in a hurry to catch a quick buck on a passing fad, film packaging makes sense, in that you get together an established roster of talent to give to the studio for a fast turnaround. The two slapped together a package with a $4.5 million budget (the equivalent of $20 million in today’s value) and were able to get Columbia interested, having them sign on even after Begelman’s embezzlement spree while head of that studio, on the strength of the talent assembled.
David Begelman meeting the press as the scandal came to light
Unfortunately, the writer was not part of the talent assembled. Guy Thomas’ sole credit before this film was a single episode of Carter Country, which makes his inclusion mysterious in retrospect. Thomas turned in a script that borrowed the high points not only from Exodus but Genesis, the Book of Samuel, and the Gospel of John, which in this case really wasn’t kosher. Worse, Thomas commits an even bigger sin, in that most of the material just really isn’t all that straight-out funny.
Weis, having done short films for SNL, and going on from there to do music videos for the likes of the Bangles and Paul Simon, would seem to be the ideal candidate for taking on the film as his next project after doing The Ruttles: All You Need is Cash. In theory, making a long form that consists of small humorous bits to be tied together under an overall arc like the Ruttles film should have been in his wheelhouse.
None of that could help Weis overcome a horrible script to work with, a threadbare budget that limited what could be shot, and lots of talent that just weren’t feeling it. An example of this is what we got with Dudley Moore sharing a scene with John Ritter (here playing Satan) right after Sodom was smote, during which time Zarelda turned back to look and got a bit salty…
It’s easy to surmise that the talent just showed up and collected checks; the hard part is fathoming which of the many reasons why they might have done this. A lackluster script, assumptions of an easy paycheck no matter what they did, too many of the chemical distractions Hollywood in the late 70s was known for, all of this could have played a part in each case.
There was just no way in heaven or hell that this was going to work. The project was born out of a quick cash grab, and was doomed to be sabotaged by the greed/chintziness/laziness/drugs/drink/insert-prefered-tsurus-here that everyone schlepped onto the set.
The entire movie was destined to end up turning to ashes before Columbia greenlit the package. It was inevitable that the results would turn out to be ashes to ashes, and junk to junk.
As a result, this film died from its own sins…
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