Artemis 81

In the alien planet Artemis 8 1 with its two suns, Magog (Sevilla Delofski), the mother-goddess, is awakened from her endless sleep. Magog's two sons Helith (Sting), the white angel, and Asrael (Roland Curram), the black angel, are fighting for the control of the Earth. Asrael leads the master organist Drachenfels (Dan O'Herlihy) to steal a delicate image of Magog from a Danish museum, and to hide it's five broken pieces in as much luggage of unwise passengers of the ocean-ferry back to England. Drachenfels is to write and perform a certain organ piece, so powerful as to break yet another image of Magog aka Sheela na Gig, hidden in a high arch of an Anglican minster - a remnant of the old religion hidden within the new. From the image's womb, a glass vase will fall and break, delivering a poison so powerful as to bring about the End of Times. Helith will try to prevent the ultimate end by getting the pulp novelist Gideon Harlax (Hywel Bennett), a human writer, interested in the mysterious deaths of people with nothing in common but having traveled the same day on the ocean ferry from Denmark. Harlax's quest for truth involves his relationship with the musician Gwen Meredith (Dinah Stabb) and the film scholar Jed Thaxter (Ian Redford) - and his own bi-sexual identity. By coincidence (the film rightly hints it does not exist) both call on Gideon, and leave messages in his recording machine. In different ways, the worlds and the knowledge (gnosis) of Gwen and Jed - organ music composition and film making - are (in part) revealed to Gideon, after his initiation into code breaking by a History scholar. Gideon descends to hell after his visit to Hell's Mouth, guided and protected by Helith: a barren land of apparent normality, but where everybody seems to be acutely sick, and speaking a foreign language backwards. Gideon delivers Gwen from the hellish underworld, but not so Jed, who perishes when Gideon kisses him. At last, running against time, controlled to the minute in a Christmas concert from a minster, transmitted live by the BBC, Gideon must stop Drachenfels from playing the end music. It is revealed that Drachenfeld, yet a Faustian character, has been dealing with Asrael to postpone the end of his composition, in a trade-off for Asrael to keep both him and his lover alive since times immemorial.