Perhaps Anger's most elaborate film, LUCIFER RISING takes place at various historically "magic" spots in Egypt, England and Germany. The odd rock-tinged soundtrack pulls viewers through a series of obsessively staged and hauntingly realized ceremonies, movements and rituals. Experimental editing techniques, mixed with more traditional cinematic structures, add to the eerie and compelling visual quality of this avant-garde masterpiece. Marianne Faithfull, The Rolling Stones, Satanism, lightning, pyramids and extravagant costumes are only a few of the contributing elements that bring this film to a fever pitch of strangeness and cultural abstraction. Like other Anger films, LUCIFER RISING reads like a music video from outer space or Ancient Egypt or wherever the two may meet.

Anger's psychedelic head-play unfolds through dreamlike imagery that evokes our primal urges and ancient ancestors. With heavy reference to Ancient Egyptian symbolism and mythology, Anger creates an intricate tapestry of images that is about as pure as cinema gets. While the film could be seen as clich?d late-'60s drug-fuelled experimentalism (although of course Anger was partially responsible for the creation of those clich?s), when viewed in a receptive state it is unlike anything else. Anger is an extremely skillful film-maker, as his photographic eye and confident editing show. He is able to suggest something raw and animalistic through his juxtaposition of the violence and beauty in nature, prefiguring Nick Zedd's Theory of Xenomorphosis, in which he proposed the negation of the opposites on which we base our social codes, and achieving a freedom or transcendence through their unification. Anger seems to suggest this by drawing parallels between violence and beauty, and God and Satan (or good and evil).

'Lucifer Rising' is given dramatic emphasis by Bobby Beausoleil's psychedelic rock score, recorded while he was serving time in prison for his involvement with the Manson Family Murders. (In fact, Bobby was Anger's lover when initial shooting began on the film, and he was originally supposed to play a lead role. He still appears briefly, but most of this footage was eventually scrapped after his incarceration.

'Lucifer Rising' is one of the peaks of underground film-making. It has a fascinating history, for anyone who cares to read up on it, and it is a profound and visceral viewing experience.

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