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Something is dangerously wrong with filmmaker Damon Packard. Just clicking on his official website leads to a plea for financial help and a list of purchasable cinematic oddities, all accompanied by an eerily reverberating version of The Carpenter’s “Rainy Days and Mondays”. Lost somewhere within his own unsettled mind and a fatalistic love of the ‘70s, Packard has produced dozens of short films, motion picture experiments and long form features. Perhaps his most notorious – for reasons both artistic and legal – is Reflections of Evil. In it’s original format, this stream of crackpot consciousness masterwork used found footage, bootlegged film clips, material recorded off television and a healthy homage to the ABC Movie of the Week to craft a totally surreal supernatural mystery. Unfortunately, when Go-Kart Films tried to release a DVD version of Packard’s perturbed vision, massive edits had to be made. The result was an equally brilliant, if substantially different look at one man’s battle for persona, and professional redemption.
The narrative – if there is one to mention – centers on an angry, morbidly obese street vendor (played by Packard) who’s haunted by the death of his sister. Roaming the sidewalks of LA, screaming at himself in animalist grunts, Packard’s camera catches real people panicked over his obvious psychotic ranting. His curse-laden tirades seem aimed more at the cosmos, however than the surrounding modern world. Buried in between these slapdash sideshow antics are reenactments of Steven Spielberg shooting the genre gem Something Evil, sequences from the Universal Studios tour, and ethereal inserts featuring a near perfect capturing of the slow motion depiction of television terror. But this is just part of the story. Behind the scenes, after completing the project, Packard made more than 20,000 DVD copies. He proceeded to distribute them all, free of charge. He left them around the city (in stores and at ATMs) and mailed many directly to celebrities. He got the occasional response (several messages, both good and very bad, have been catalogued on Packard’s Web site), and found a champion in Sylvester Stallone’s son Sage. But most of the response was vile and hateful.
Of course, for this decidedly disturbed director, such rejection was a sign of the social significance in his work. Packard perceives Hollywood, and those bound to its influences, as a disease overloaded with conspiracy and cabals. To him, modern movies are forged out of a Free Mason sense of secrecy with the studios purposefully setting out to subvert the efforts of those wanting to make a difference. Reflections of Evil is a stuttering shock treatment approach to understanding this indecipherable design, a movie masquerading as a madman’s mission statement. No one said the truth would be comfortable or easy. No one said the past was pain-free. Packard understands this all too well, and just like his motion picture protagonist, he also suffers with the obvious oppression of everyday life. This is an amazing cinematic shriek, a primal scream in the face of aesthetic helplessness. It is also one of the finest experimental films ever made.
