The Astrologer (1975)

directed by Craig Denney

77 minutes

USA

3 stars out of 5

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There are two movies from 1975 called "The Astrologer", and like a lot of people, I watched the wrong one first. I did not review it because even though it was pretty wacky in and of itself, it was also incredibly boring. This movie, presumed lost for a long time and hard to find up until recently, made by a writer/director/actor who fell off the face of the Earth immediately afterwards because he probably financed it with mob money, is the cult favorite I wanted to see.

It's fairly obvious that this is something of a vanity project (although "vanity project" typically describes media created by already-famous people, which this guy is... not) because the entire thing centers around Craig Alexander, real name Craig Denney, and how the world is persecuting him for his life of crime. He goes through the movie not really expecting to ever have anything bad happen to him, and this is the attitude of the narrative itself: Even though he's a con man and is ostensibly presented as a criminal, everybody around him seems to encourage his shady acts (unless they're villains, openly plotting against him) and when they finally catch up to him for the petty crime of, oh, you know, killing a guy, the mood is more like "why is everyone leaving me? what did I ever do?" than "look at him getting his just desserts". There are a lot of crime movies where we're meant to root for the criminal, but usually this is done by making the criminal sympathetic or making the people coming after the criminal even worse than they are, and The Astrologer does neither of these things.

This is also one of those movies where every actor seems to think they're in a different movie. Everybody in this who isn't Craig Denney approaches their role from an entirely different place, but none of them are that consequential in relation to the main character, and this actually produces a fairly interesting result, which is that everyone in this somehow seems like somebody you know. Like, these could be your parents' friends or people you see all the time at work or something. Each character seems to have a separate and distinct personality with their own hidden motivations that don't ever come out to us, the viewers, but are still present in their demeanor and actions. A lot of low-budget movies from the 1970s feature extremely wooden and stiff acting, but not this one. It barely feels like anybody in this is acting, except for Craig Denney, who has the vibe of Tom Cruise if he had never gotten famous and fell in with the mafia instead.

I guess this also has a plot. Again, it's actually pretty interesting, but the way it's handled by this guy versus how it would be handled by literally anybody else is what makes it remarkable. The main character, as stated, is a con man, but he also seems to possess actual abilities, which makes it a little confusing exactly how he's a con man. It's like "con man" is just a career choice he made, the way somebody might decide to go into manufacturing, or look for a job in the nonprofit sector. He's presented as the world's greatest astrologer and has invented an entirely new form of astrology that becomes the dominant method and earns him hundreds of millions of dollars. Unfortunately he flies too close to the sun- or in this case, the illegal diamond smuggling operation in Kenya- and it leads to his downfall. Well, really, the whole killing a guy thing is what leads to his downfall. Don't worry too much about the plot. It really doesn't matter much to the overall experience of this movie. At one point the fictional Craig creates and releases a movie titled "The Astrologer", which has the same plot as the real-life The Astrologer, and it's an enormous hit that earns him even more millions of dollars. So this movie exists within itself. It's like that.

You can also tell that Denney thinks far more of his directorial skills than is warranted. Several times, you can practically see him behind the camera or on the editing floor going "ah yes... this scene is pure cinema... this is a thing of such beauty, this is my greatest work" but in reality what's going on is, like, a dinner scene set to a 60s love ballad where everyone is muted and you can't lip-read because it's in slow-motion. Denney has a talent for creating sweeping moments of emotion and narrative intensity that only feel that way to him. It's hard to rate this movie because it really is not very good, but it's also so enigmatic and alien-feeling that it's worthwhile just for the fact that there's nothing else like it. People really don't make movies like they did in the 70s and sometimes that's a good thing. Also, I've deliberately mentioned Craig Denney's name so much here to make very clear which movie I'm talking about, so you don't accidentally watch the other The Astrologer, which is about a guy who knows his girlfriend is going to give birth to Jesus, but he doesn't know when, and he has to prevent her from being seduced by the Antichrist, who has been reborn as a charismatic Indian suicide cult leader.