Underworld (1985) aka Transmutations

Underworld aka Transmutations (1985)

Dir. George Pavlou

Written by Clive Barker, James Caplin

Starring Larry Lamb, Denholm Elliot, Steven Berkoff, Nicola Cowper, Ingrid Pitt, Art Malik, Sean Chapman, Miranda Richardson

Let me sing you a familiar tune: Look! It’s this ultra-obscure horror movie with a great cast, written by one of horror’s acknowledged modern luminaries, featuring some kind of crazy plot about a drug that mutates you based on your dreams! I wonder why it’s not better known? There’s no WAY that’s not great!

Guess what kiddies. There is a way. But hey, at least the nagging possibility that it was somehow an unfairly forgotten gem won’t haunt me anymore, because at great expense and with some difficulty, I acquired this rightfully forgotten early 80’s horror dud which marks the fairly inauspicious screenwriting debut for Clive Barker (The HELLRAISER series, CLIVE BARKER’S BOOK OF BLOOD). Guess what, it ain’t that great. It’s not a total disaster, but it’s plenty bad, and, more damningly, pretty dull. But to justify the expense of finding out exactly why this one was so immediately and thoroughly scrubbed from the culture’s collective memory, I’m going to have to delve into it a little.

Things start off with some promise -- there’s some handsome, expressionistically lit 80’s cinematography (plenty of that nice blue haze they loved back then) and a compelling tone of freaky mystery. We open with some weirdos in an opulent London brothel being attacked by a gang of crazy ninja monster freaks, who carry off the comatose 80’s-fabulous Nicole (Nicola Cowper, DREAMCHILD, LIONHEART), a perfectly adequate setup for a bizarre mystery. Nicole is apparently some kind of completely irresistible siren of beauty, which we know because multiple characters discuss it as well as from a heartfelt algorithm-composed synth ballad that croons over her prone form.* That’s a hard claim to reconcile with what we’re seeing, inasmuch as she’s so aggressively 80’s fabulous that she resembles Gozer from GHOSTBUSTERS, but with less charisma. A lot of the movie looks suspiciously like it was shot on the Total Eclipse of the Heart video set, so maybe it’s just a vibe thing, otherwise I don’t know what to tell ya.

Nevertheless, shifty crimelord Hugo Motherskille (Stephen Berkoff, THE FLESH AND THE FIENDS [medical student, uncredited], A CLOCKWORK ORANGE) wants her back, so he drags this guy Roy (Larry Lamb… uh, BLOOD, THE LAST VAMPIRE?) out of retirement to go looks for her. He correctly guesses that Roy will eventually for no reason happen to be standing nearby to a pothole and see the mutants go in, which would be easy to criticize as an unfeasible and asinine plan except that, hey, it works. Motherskille --who halfheartedly claims to not be a villain, despite the fact that his name is literally Motherskille-- has a good reason to suspect that Roy can get the job done, though, because he knows that Roy is the fucking baddest mother this side of Chris Pratt in Jurassic World, at least in terms of how devoted the script is to telling us that he’s awesome. This is always a bad sign, particularly when we get to see the questionable way he goes about setting up his so-called investigation. Everyone keeps insisting that Roy is the best, but boy, if this really is the best, it’s hard to see how society functions at all. As you begin to get more and more annoyed about Roy’s somnambulistic monotone and his ineffectual detective work, you’ll also start to notice that people in this movie say his name a lot. Which will either begin to exponentially infuriate you, or, if you’re taking a drink every time they do, will save your moviegoing experience (but also possibly kill you, so plan accordingly).

As Roy begins to unravel the mystery, the few hints of genuine intrigue the beginning managed to conjure quickly fade, as it becomes increasingly obvious that the answers (to the extent that the nonsensical plot even delivers answers) are surprisingly uninteresting and straightforward. Seems there is some kind of drug being manufactured by Dr. Savary (Denholm Elliot, TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD, and, uh, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC I guess) which does… something with dreams (?) and then turns you into a mutant drug addict. Only Nicole is immune from its mutating effects, for reasons which might be interesting if the movie ever got around to explaining them. Everyone wants a piece of Nicole so they can figure out what the deal is, although it’s kinda unclear what the drug does anyway or why it’s such a big deal to everyone. It’s kinda cool that the mutants here (spoilers?) actually turn out to be the good guys, kinda prefiguring the structure of Barker’s later, better NIGHTBREED, but the villains here aren’t as good and neither are the monsters. The  makeup design looks like shit -- you gotta either go cooler or grosser; just lumpy ain’t getting the job done, especially since we never really learn much about any of them. Gradually the whole conflict kind of runs out of steam and goes nowhere, ending in an indifferently staged gunfight, which is something tantamount to an unforgivable failure of imagination considering this is a  Clive Barker film.

Despite having Denholm Elliott, Steven Berkoff, Art Malik, Ingrid Pitt, Sean Chapman (uncle Frank from Hellraiser!) and even a little Miranda Richardson, things get less interesting with every minute of screentime. You want to like this one, but it just doesn’t give you a lot of ammo to defend it. It’s too uneventful, sometimes to the point that it seems deliberately anticlimactic. At one point both our hero and the villain are injected with the supposedly deadly transmuting drug. And guess what -- absolutely nothing happens, and no one ever mentions it again! They don’t even seem to get high! Far too much time is spent on the gradually deflating mystery narrative, and once it finally gets where it’s going, none of the interesting possibilities are really touched on, it just turns into a small-scale gang fight between gangsters and monsters (but the monsters don’t have special powers or anything, just guns). Clive Barker has apparently stated that this film was one of the reasons he directed HELLRAISER himself (which turned out to be a great decision), but shit, it’s hard to imagine how this could ever have worked to begin with, unless they completely changed the screenplay -- which may well have been the case, considering the interesting hints that there was originally something about, I dunno, dream zombies or something? If there ever was anything interesting, though, it didn't make it to the final version. It’s not the absolute worst Clive Barker adaptation (BOOK OF BLOOD is easily duller and uglier; at least this one is nicely lit) but it may well be the most disappointing. But hey, at least it ultimately led us to HELLRAISER. Whenever you’re experimenting with really new ideas, you gotta expect a few unfortunate Transmutations along the way.

*The film's music was produced by synthpop group Freur, which later evolved into the band Underworld (apparently they named themselves after this film! Well, at least someone was a fan). They suck, but at least they give the whole enterprise a little personality and energy. They’re also on the soundtrack for LET ME IN, so good for them, coming up in the world.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2015 CHECKLIST!

Play it Again, Samhain

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Adapted by Barker from one of his own short stories
• SEQUEL: No
• REMAKE: No
• DEADLY IMPORT FROM: England
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Denholm Elliot? I don't really think of him as a horror icon, but he racked up an impressive amount of horror films over the years.
• BOOBIES: No
• MULLETS: Good bit of 80's do's (and don'ts) but I dunno. Art Malik looks like he kinda has one, but it's also slicked back on top so a little hard to tell.
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: No
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Melting guy rips off his flesh first, pretty cool.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: No.
• MONSTER: Mutants!
• THE UNDEAD: No
• POSSESSION: No
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): No
• EVIL CULT: None
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: None
• EGYPTO-CRYPTO: No
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Man into mutant, but that's all happened before the events of our story.
• VOYEURISM: Nah
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Very high, long out of print and never on DVD.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Drugs are whack.
• TITLE ACCURACY: Pretty generic, but reasonably accurate.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.

Candyman 2: Farewell To the Flesh

Candy 2: Farewell to the Flesh (1995)

Dir. Bill Condon (?!)

Written by Rand Ravich, Mark Kruger, from a story by Clive Barker

Starring Tony Todd, Kelly Rowan, Timothy Carhart, Veronica Cartwright, Bill Nunn

You know how Jazz began in New Orleans, and then migrated up to Chicago, but caught on there and was first recorded and introduced to the rest of the world as the Chicago style, only to have its success revive the New Orleans sound and identity in the process? Turns out Candyman is the same thing. We learn here that Daniel “Candyman” Robitaille (Tony “Candyman” Todd) was in fact a New Orleans native, a son of the South who we got to know up in Chicago in the original CANDYMAN, apparently solely due to the fact that he’s accessible anywhere there’s a mirror. But CANDYMAN: FAREWELL 2 DA FLESH is bringin’ it all back home. This is a strictly Cajun affair, where off-screen voices will frequently be talking loudly about gumbo (it’s called authenticity, people. Look it up).

There’s a lot of white people at the start, though, and they’re all of lesser quality than part 1’s Virginia Madsen and Xander Berkeley. Kelly Rowan (a character named “Lorri Lee” in THE GATE?) plays a nice rich white lady teaching a class of loveable black kids about how to stop worrying about Candyman so much. At first she doesn’t seem to have a lot of connection to or interest in Candyman, except for the unusual fact that her brother is currently in prison, prime suspect in a series of recent hook-related murders.* And also her dad died years ago under mysterious hook-related circumstances. And her mom is Veronica Cartwright, you so know she’s going to get drunk and reveal a major secret at the end of the third act. But other than that, and the fact that she teaches a class of kids who seem to think and talk about nothing but Candyman, there seems to be no obvious link, at first.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall... who's the fairest of all the hook-wielding maniac of all?

Things get off to a clunky beginning. It was an early cheapie for Bill Condon (GODS AND MONSTERS, KINSEY, and, uh, TWILIGHT PART III) and has some of that ugly 1995 production design and lighting (and clothing, obviously). But considering that the excellent original CANDYMAN didn’t exactly scream out for a dubious cheapie sequel, this is better than I expected. Not as good as it could have been, but better than expected. It starts off a little rough but the strong use of real New Orleans locations combined with the central tragedy of Candyman’s story end up building a nice atmosphere of gothic tragedy by the end. Around the halfway mark it shakes off a lot of its more dubious elements and focuses on giving us some solid Candyman action, plus eventually Bill Nunn shows up as a priest. Even the crappiness of the 90’s can’t prevent New Orleans (pre-Katrina!) from looking mysterious and cool, so that helps.

It’s a rare sequel where we actually learn a little more about the central monster, but it doesn’t de-mystify him or seem like needless overexplanation. We learn what the deal is with the mirror, for example, I don’t think that was covered in the original, but it tells us a little more about him and why he ended up this way. They also finally explain the “Candyman” nickname, arguably less successfully. Still, Tony Todd has a great presence, and does a nice job with both the tragic backstory and the modern-day hookhand killer schtick. Makes you understand why the hookhand killer from I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER hides his face, who wants to have to compete with Tony? In fact, it occurs to me that if they ever wanted to rethink the whole “Candyman” nickname and, say, name him after one of his more memorable features (“HoneyCombRibMan” or “HookHandKillerDude” or “ThatGuyFromWhenWeSayHisNameFiveTimesInTheMirror”) they could easily rename this series I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST CENTURY.

You can tell this is the past, because it's sort of beige.

That’s ultimately the coolest thing about Candyman, of course; he’s not just a standard hookhand killer, in some ways he’s a reflection of America’s racist and murderous past come back to haunt us. This movie gives a more literal explanation, but I can’t help but feel that the significance of summoning Candyman through the mirror is that he’s really a reflection of us, of a culture who would murder a man because of who he loved, simply for of the color of his skin. Maybe we don’t want to think about it, maybe we even want to deny that we’re implicated it that, but when you look at yourself in the mirror and say his name, you’re tacitly acknowledging that on some level there’s no forgiveness that can be given for the crimes that this country perpetrated.** We’re connected to it, and even as much as we might try to deny it, the truth it waiting there behind the mirror (the narrative has a nice twist towards the end which actually makes this explicit, I like that).

Anyway, nowhere in the same league as the first one, but if you can make it through the rocky first half the end manages a nice apocalyptic vibe and a satisfactory respect for the strengths of the story. It’s in no way required viewing, but for the true Candyman aficionado, it might provide some mild satisfaction. If you don’t believe me, just look in the mirror and repeat “I love cheapie franchise sequels” five times. It’ll come to you.

*But wait, you think, that proves nothing! It could just as easily be a Hellraiser-related fatality! True, but what if I told you it was that same ponytail’d professor guy from Part I? That raise any alarms?

**We should thank our lucky stars he wasn’t a Native American, then he’d really have cause to be pissed.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2014 CHECKLIST!

The Hunt For Dread October

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: "From the Mind of Clive Barker"
• SEQUEL: Yes, to the beloved original
• REMAKE: No
• FOREIGNER: No
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: Bill Condon, directing one of his first films
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Tony Todd
• BOOBIES: Don't think so. No specific recollection.
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: Nah
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: Candyman loses his hand
• HAUNTED HOUSE: Nah, not exactly
• MONSTER: No
• THE UNDEAD: Yeah, our man of the hour is definitely a ghost, right?
• POSSESSION: There's definitely a possession-y vibe with the dad I think
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): I think this is closer
• EVIL CULT: None
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: No
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Does the bee stuff count? I guess not.
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: Mid. Sequel to beloved classic, got studio release but not much attention.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Don't murder handsome African American artists/heir to shoe fortune, because hundreds of years after you are dead random people unrelated to the murder will be haunted by his vengeful ghost.
• TITLE ACCURACY: Well, I still think it would make more sense to call him hookhand guy, but the Candyman part is correct, and the "2". I don't know what "Farewell to the Flesh" means, presumably its a literal translation of “carne vale” aka Carnival, which would make sense with the New Orleans setting, but doesn't really meaningfully figure into the movie. I'll say 80%.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A

This is a little generous, but I'm willing to give it credit for not being as crappy as I imagined. Call it C-

Clive Barker's Book of Blood

Book of Blood (2009)
Dir. by John Harrison
Written by John Harrison, Darin Silverman
Starring Jonas Armstrong, Sophie Ward, tiny, tiny cameo by Doug Bradley

Hey, speaking of framing stories (like we were in V/H/S VIRAL, try and keep up here guys) here’s a good idea: what if you were to take an anthology --you know, those handy full-length vehicles comprised of short stories or segments bookended by a framing sketch-- and, get this, removed the stories, and just left the framing narrative? It’s crazy, right? But maybe just crazy enough to work. If they pull this off, it’ll change everything.

Oh wait, no, it’s just a terrible idea. What these morons here do is take ONLY the brief framing prologue from Clive Barker’s excellent horror anthology Book of Blood (the seventh story from that anthology to be adapted, after RAWHEAD REX, MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN, CANDYMAN, LORD OF ILLUSIONS, QUICKSILVER HIGHWAY and DREAD), adapt the whole thing (adding a little fat), add an additional framing story to this framing story, and then realize they’ve only filled 10 minutes of screentime. What accounts for the intervening 86 minutes might generously be described as a plot in the most technical sense, but it’s so direly without any reason for existence that it almost crosses over the line from painfully dull to genuinely horrifying based solely on the fact that it clearly exists in defiance of the will of any kind and loving god.

Read between the lines.

I mean, director John Harrison actually has some experience with anthology horror films, having directed the workaday but acceptable TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE. Surely for at least a moment before he began developing this grinding nothing of a movie, he must have briefly paused to imagine what that one would have been like if instead of dropping in other stories, he had just tried to fatten out the 10 minutes of Debbie Harry as a witch into a full 100 minute feature. Or if THE ILLUSTRATED MAN was just about a guy getting tattooed, and never specifically referenced what any of the tattoos actually were. Plus, he actually wrote the score for DAY OF THE DEAD and CREEPSHOW. Come on John, you know better. We raised you better than that.

It’s not utterly without merit, I suppose. The roughly ten minutes that actually come from the Barker story are pretty decent. You got this gruesomely scarred young man (Jonas Armstrong), grabbed off the street by a jaded bounty hunter (in a better age, he would have been played by David Warner, here we have a serviceable Clive Russell) who says that someone is paying him to skin the kid and keep the whole thing in one piece. Pretty fuckin mysterious, right? Unfortunately for the subsequent 80 minutes, we don’t really deal with this mystery but instead get involved in the lame flashback ghosthunting shenanigans of these two worthless morons (Sophie Ward and Paul Blair), who eventually get involved with the young man (as yet unscarred). He claims that he’s a psychic and can help them make contact with the spirits of the haunted house they’re staying in (one apparently being Doug Bradley, who makes an approximately 8 second wordless cameo and also appears on a painting you can see in the background in a couple shots, for whatever reason). The ghost hunters decide to make him the focus of their investigation because they are so stunningly inept that they seem to have no other plan whatsoever except to sit in the house with a camera and hope a ghost turns up. But SPOILER, he turns out to be a phony, and somehow for no reason at all faked the whole thing, so that was pointless. He does have a weird, incredibly inappropriate sex scene with Ward, though, so you got that to look forward to. Otherwise, literally nothing of note happens in the entire middle section.

Not the most relaxing message environment.

The two bookends of the movie are fine enough, and the whole thing is perfectly competent. I mean, it looks decent, the performances are generally acceptable, it’s got an OK score. There’s one cool scene early on where a chick gets her face ripped off, that’s always nice. But that long middle stretch, jesus. I’ve seen a lot of dull, uneventful horror cheapies, but at least they have the good sense to be incompetent enough that you can laugh at them. This one simply offers nothing of value whatsoever. It barely even exists. It seems to drag on and on, maintaining the same low level of competence but without ever finding a single incident of interest. It’s just lame, derivative filler while the movie patiently waits til it gets to the end so it can go back to the Barker source material.

The only memorable thing here, period, is a long spoken passage which I assume comes from Barker’s original book. Here it is in full:

“The dead have highways, running through the wasteland behind our lives, bearing an endless traffic of departed souls. They can be heard in the broken places of our world, through cracks made out of cruelty, violence, and depravity. They have sign posts, these highways, and crossroads and intersections. And it is at these intersections where the dead mingle, and sometimes spill over into our world.“

That’s a perfectly good bit of horror writing, just the kind of overwrought prose that you want from a guy of Barker’s dark imagination. But unfortunately, the reason it’s memorable is not that it’s so great in itself, but that it is repeated an unforgivable four or fives times*, in full, by various characters and a narrator throughout the course of this turkey. Now that you’ve read it, you’ve saved yourself another 10 minutes of screentime. Of course, hearing it that many times eventually causes it to lose all meaning and simply begs you to start picking it apart. The dead have highways? Why would they need those? Are these, like, interstate highways, or is it more like a route 66 scenic route? And where are the dead going? Are there rest stops on the highway of the dead? I mean, they have crossroads and intersections, so presumably there are roundabouts and yield signs and traffic cones and stuff. If they have highways, they’ve got to have maintenance crews fixing them up from time to time. Does that mean that the dead have congestion issues? And they have places to mingle, not really too common on the highway but maybe they mean truck stops and shit, where methed-out trucker ghosts can stop for a quicky with a toothless, dead-eyed ghost hooker (not that this would be too different from the living version)? Or is that cynical of me, do they actually mean quaint roadside diners with elaborate tourist trap fiberglass dinosaur statues and stuff to draw the dead off at their exit? Or maybe the dead are more sophisticated than that, maybe they have hip coffee shops and art installations where the dead can mingle as they move along the highways at their own pace. Speaking of mingling, do they have Christianmingle, or does being dead kinda sort that out? These are all questions worth exploring. What the movie proves beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the one question not worth exploring was, “what do you suppose happened to those characters in the framing story that the original author didn’t feel was worth including?”

*I realize that’s a little vague, but there’s no way I’m watching through again to nail that number down. Once was already too many.

OK I admit this is cool, but it's literally 5 seconds of the movie.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2014 CHECKLIST!

The Hunt For Dread October

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Adapted from the framing narrative to Clive Barker's Book of Blood.
• SEQUEL: None.
• REMAKE: No.
• FOREIGNER: Nope.
• FOUND-FOOTAGE CLUSTERFUCK: No.
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None.
• BELOVED HORROR ICON: Doug Bradley, for, generously, 10 seconds.
• BOOBIES: Yeah, couple extended sex scenes.
• SEXUAL ASSAULT: Demonic/Ghost rape combined with skin- stealing, although by the end it seems to have been completely forgotten about and it's never exactly addressed what the deal was with that.
• DISMEMBERMENT PLAN: (Spoiler) Skin removed.
• HAUNTED HOUSE: Yes, the house is haunted, it's at that stupid crossroads thing.
• MONSTER: None.
• THE UNDEAD: Many ghosts
• POSSESSION: No, not really. Seems to flirt with the idea for a bit but never commits.
• SLASHER/GIALLO: No.
• PSYCHO KILLERS (Non-slasher variety): The bounty hunter guy is a killer, I guess.
• EVIL CULT: Doug Bradley seemed to have something occult happening, but its never elaborated on.
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: No dolls.
• TRANSMOGRIFICATION: Guy becomes book of blood, does that count?
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: High. Rightfully ignored.
• MORAL OF THE STORY: Fucking adapt the actual stories of an anthology, not just the cover.
• TITLE ACCURACY: Well, they call the dude a book of blood, that seems kinda a loose interpretation of both book and blood, but I guess you could claim the title is just poetic or in reference to what the characters say.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A

Lord of Illusions

Lord of Illusions (1995)
Dir. Clive Barker
Written by Clive Barker
Starring Scott Bakula, Kevin J. O’Connor, Famke Janssen, Daniel Von Bargen

    Boy, I remember when this movie came out, can you believe that? I was in fifth grade at the time, and for some reason I got it in my head that this movie had to be the single scariest fucking thing in the history of the world. The ominous title, the special-effects-driven trailers, the association with something called “Hellraiser” which I didn’t know what the fuck it was but sure sounded depraved and scandalous. I begged my parents to let me watch it, and their flat refusal on the (correct) grounds that it was a terrible idea just furthered the mystique for me. This may actually be the only movie ever that my parents forbade me to see.

    Well, sorry Mom and Dad, it took me a little under twenty years but guess what, I finally did it, I saw LORD OF ILLUSIONS. And also, guess what, not the scariest fucking thing in the history of the world. In fact, not even the scariest fucking thing in the room I saw it in (there was a bottle of blue MD 20/20 on the table). But it is sort of interesting, mainly for Clive Barker’s interesting attempt to wed Noir conventions to his typically twisted horror tropes. I said interesting, not good. But it has it’s moments.

    Scott Bakula plays Harry D’Amour, private eye. He’s recently gotten off a weird case which may or may not have been supernatural in origin (actually, I just realized the film never does resolve that -- surprising restraint there) and is gradually drawn under the employ of Phillip Swann (Kevin J. O’Connor in a rare role where he’s only kind of an asshole), a stage magician who may just be the real deal. Turns out Swann learned his tricks from a creepy cult leader named Nix (Daniel Von Bargen) who was abandoned and killed by his former pupil on account of being such a child-murdering psycho asshat, but who may not have stayed quite as dead as we all might have hoped.

Bakula rocks the man-tramp-stamp.

    Though nowhere near their technical equal, Barker’s penchant for imaginative, unique horror creations is the rival of luminaries like H. P. Lovecraft, David Cronenberg and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Few horror writers are as willing and able to craft complex, fresh scenarios to creep you out rather than relying on old standards like zombies, vampires, ghosts, etc. Unfortunately, Barker’s imagination typically outpaces his technical chops by a considerable distance (HELLRAISER being the only real exception) and as a result his nightmares are usually conceptually superior to their chintzy execution. Such is the case here; there’s some creepy stuff in here, but mostly it feels like the same old over-lit under-directed special effects laden cheeseball 90’s schlock that you’d probably expect. Nix is good and scary and O’Connor is pretty interesting as the morally ambiguous Swann, but Bakula overplays his Noir persona to a level bordering on parody, wasting his natural likeability and never coming across as remotely hardboiled. There’s some fun parts, including a witheringly snide Vincent Schiavelli as a rival magician and an attack by -- maaaagical colored polygons! Early CG effects are so cute.

    Really, though, the film is more Noir than horror, and suffers enormously from Barker’s slack storytelling and inability to conjure a convincing (or consistent) atmosphere of mystery. It’s convoluted but uneventful, meaning by the time we get to a decent horror scene or two, it’s already too late. It’s earnestness and 90’s nostalgia might earn it a little goodwill, but it’s a long, long way from being a good movie, let alone effective horror. Guess Mom and Dad were right after all. Still, there’s some promise in it’s fluid handling of two somewhat rigidly structured genres -- for a much better example, see Tommy Lee Jone’s 1998 Noir ghost story GOTHAM. Barker’s got a righteously sick mind, but he might need a little help getting it to work properly on the screen.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2012 CHECKLIST!

LOVECRAFT ADAPTATION: No, Barker adapts his own work.
BOOBIES: Bakula and Janssen definitely get it on, but I think it's pretty tame.
> or = HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS LEVEL GORE: Some pretty gnarly impalings.
SEQUEL: No.
OBSCURITY LEVEL: Mid-low. High profile 90's fare.
MONSTERS: There's one pretty cool (claymation?) brain/rock monster, but it turns out to be (guess what?) and illusion. I'll count it anyway, though.
SATANISTS: Cultists, but no Satan.
ZOMBIES: Nix definitely looks a little worse for ware, post-grave. But it seems iffy, and I already counted an imaginary monster.
VAMPIRES: No.
SLASHERS: No.
CURSES: Nah.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A.