Spirit Riser

Your brain will never taste the same after the electrifying acid bath that is the cult feature Spirit Riser, written, directed, and edited by the otherworldly auteur Dylan Mars Greenberg. Sydney Ryder (Summer Greenberg) is a young girl taken care of by her older sister, Ingrid (Amanda Flowers). Ingrid possesses special powers that tip her off to an imminent attack on their house by the man from the dark and lonely place (Whitney Moore). She tells Sydney to hurry up and run while Ingrid holds them off. Sydney barely makes it out of the house before it explodes.

Sydney flees across the country to New York City, where she falls under the protection of Detective Alan Mortal (Alan Merrill). To help Sydney evade her pursuers, Mortal calls in a favor with his ex-wife (Lynn Lowry), a TV anchor who announces Sydney is dead. Meanwhile, Ingrid awakens on a road unconscious, almost hit by a speeding car. The drivers of the car, twin sisters Parker (Kansas Bowling) and Kansas (Parker Bowling), let Ingrid know she is in California and take her home to their foster mother, Miss Skylace (Cherie Currie). They soon find out Ingrid is a spirit riser, which means she sprays energy waves, and people fall down. But the man from the dark and lonely place is a powerful entity who summons the assistance of evil forces from a dimension known as the Otherness to hunt the sisters down.

“Ingrid possesses special powers that tip her off to an imminent attack on their house…”

Spirit Riser is a film that acts like a drug, and it is some weird coastal designer one that kicks in immediately. As with all the best drugs, the movie will be habit-forming as you watch it over and over to keep chasing the high you got watching it for the first time. That is why cult movies are cult movies, because of the devoted viewers who repeatedly milk the film’s teat raw. Director Greenberg understands what a cult audience wants and delivers it with two scoops of eyeballs. She increases the weirdness with each scene, introducing one new mind f**k after another. Greenberg feeds the audience sensations until serotonin runs down our faces like mascara.