AN OLDIE BUT A GOODIE FROM MY FAVORITE AUTHOR THAT BEGS THE QUESTION - HOW IN THE WORLD CAN A MOVIE BE SO GOOD WHEN IT IS OH SO BAD?

Lord Of Illusions (1995)

Hi, I'm Miss Mayhem. Miss Murder is giving me a chance to do a movie review on a favorite that she says she's seen 'lots of times' and has her notes all ready for a review. She asked if I would watch the movie and then kind of take the notes and put this review together. Please bear with me, I'm trying to see the humor in horror. MST3K is helping, but I'm still learning.

When I saw it, I was actually surprised that, besides being a 'horror' movie, it actually had a good story to it. Trouble was, the story wasn't very developed as far as I could see. Yes, I know the movie comes from a short story so the fact that it was 109 minutes long was kind of impressive and stupid at the same time. And it starred Scott Bakula. I kind of remember him being in one of the Star Trek series although I don't think I ever watched that show.

For a horror movie, I think that Bakula's depiction of D'Amour was pretty neat and I wished they had made the movie just about him. He plays it like a detective-type movie but there's the supernatural part that means his cases usually involve possessions or other spooky stuff. His body is covered in tattoos and I wanted to know why but they didn't say much about his character at all. Here is how Miss Murder starts her review:



Wow, I didn't realize this was made THAT long ago. This is derived from a short story by one of my favorite horror writers, Clive Barker, taken from Books Of Blood, called The Last Illusion. The main characters are played by Scott Bakula, who is Harry D'Amour who we get the hint is an old hand at handling all things weird and/or demonic; Kevin O'Connor as Philip Swann, who promotes himself as an illusionist but is actually something much, much more; and one of my favorites, Famke Janssen, as his wife Dorothea.

I got my copies of the Books Of Blood waaaay back when they were first published in the 80's and I read them so many times they were pretty messed up. I was glad when they combined the six books into two, I needed new copies. In there you'll see where the following movies came from:

• The Book Of Blood (First movie I ever saw that was made from the foreward and postscript of a book and not one of the stories)
• Candyman (from the story The Forbidden)
• The Midnight Meat Train
• Dread
• Tales From The Darkside's episode 'The Yattering and Jack' from the story of the same name
• Quicksilver Highway (from the story The Body Politic)
• Rawhead Rex

Miss Mayhem again. I liked this movie but since we complain about stuff, if I had anything bad to say about this movie, it's that nothing at all is explained. We don't know who Nix is, why he has powers, why he has a cult in the middle of a desert, why Swann is the only other one with powers, why Nix wants to sacrifice a young girl, why does Swann have this magic helmet that will defeat Nix and where did he get it, why blood is necessary to seal it onto his head... this could fill the page I guess. It's kind of like Barker just says 'Look, this is my story, don't ask any questions just watch it, okay?' And we're supposed to nod and just accept everything. I'm probably being too harsh but I had so many questions, and there's only this short story to read that doesn't explain anything either. Back to Miss Murder:

We start in 1982 in the middle of nowhere where a nasty man named Nix is leader of a strange cult in a house out in the middle of nowhere for no good reason. Nix uses magic to keep his followers - REAL magic. He wants more power and so has kidnapped a young girl for a sacrifice. Not all followers were mindless though - they try to stop Nix and save the girl. The group consists of four people -  Swann, Pimm, Quaid, and Desiderio.

During the fight, a strange looking guy named Butterfield escapes - he's got that 'one eye brown, one eye blue' thing called Heterochromia which actually is a more common than you think. Although the two actors who played the young and older Butterfield didn't actually have it (contact lenses work great that way), some other famous people that actually have different colored eyes are Mila Kunis (one brown, one green), Virginia Madsen (one green, one brown), Jane Seymour (one brown, one green), and Tim McIlrath's (Rise Against) eyes are blue and brown.



Anywho, Swann has some sort of 'magic helmet' he plans to use against Nix to imprison him and, of course, save the girl. This 'helmet' actually screws right into Nix's head and does not allow him to see or hear. He appears to be dead, and they bury him where he'll never be found. Why don't they just burn him up or something? Main problem with this movie - it raises a ton of questions but only answers a couple of pounds of them (get it?).

We skip ahead more than a decade and meet Harry D'Amour (Scott Bakula) who lives in L.A. and is very schooled in occults. His body is a map of tattoos. This movie doesn't spend nearly enough time with this character, and neither does Barker's books - his first major appearance isn't until the book Everville published in 1994. I'd love it if he'd just do books about this character - although I guess he does appear in the Hellraiser comic books (haven't seen those).

Harry also gets the strange cases which involves possession and other weird stuff. He is investigating an insurance fraud case when he comes upon a fortune teller named Quaid who, moments before he got there, had been attacked and dies from multiple stab wounds. The attacker goes after Harry and despite Harry tricking him into plunging out the window onto the cement below, the body is gone by the time the police get there. Quaid manages to warn Harry that 'The Puritan' is coming right before he dies. Uh huh.



Miss Mayhem again. You probably realize by now that conveniently ALL the people who were involved with saving the kid from Nix are in L.A. so they can be found and killed one by one (although one commits suicide to save them the trouble). Way way too convenient. Swann and the girl he rescued, who he is now married to (Famke Jannsen) live there too of course - Swann being rich from being an 'illusionist' although we know by now that he is the real thing.




But this whole movie is one big coincidence and convenience - D'Amour happens to be in L.A. and Dorothea seems to have no trouble finding him to 'hire' him to protect her husband. Swann is almost immediately killed by a new 'trick' he's put together. Nice job D'Amour. After the funeral he does the natural thing: Immediately climbs into bed with Dorothea. Eww. Back to Miss Murder:



If I outlined everything in this movie this review would go on forever so let's sum up a little bit: Swann faked his death (of course), his, uh, manager I guess, knew where Nix was buried (why exactly?) and is made to go with Butterfield to dig him up and get the helmet off (how exactly?) so that Nix can defeat Swann.

Nix comes out of the 'hole' looking like bad bacon wrapped in rags. You'd think his followers would at least have chipped in for some fresh robes or something. D'Amour finds info about Nix and so knows that both he and Swann are the 'real thing' and so conveniently finds Swann right away - because the idiot attends his own burial. MASSIVE DUH. I hate complaining about a movie made by an author I really like but this movie was so ridiculous you couldn't stay in the story - I kept throwing my hands in the air, saying things like "What?" and, "Oh, of COURSE he did," every five minutes or so. It was a terrific story mangled worse than Kubrick mangled The Shining.

So finally we get the big battle scene between Nix and Swann with Dorothea's life hanging in the balance. Hmm? Where's D'Amour? Basically sitting on his hands, 'cause they gave him absolutely nothing to do. Geez. Hmm? The ending? Quick, pointless and unsatisfying. There's no way Nix could have gotten strong enough to battle Swann, who's been growing in power for years, and having Dorothea help by shooting Nix (AGAIN, since she did the same thing as a kid) was incredibly stupid, and D'Amour looked completely worthless 'cause, well, he was.

Swann gets killed, Nix is sealed in the earth (maybe) and D'Amour and Dorothea walk out into the desert. And that's the incredibly stupid ending to what should have been an awesome story. That's what happens when you try to force a 109 minute movie out of a short story. It's really hard. Just ask Stephen King.

❦❦❦ Miss Mayhem ❦ ❦ ❦

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MOVIES YOU WATCH BECAUSE OF WHO WROTE THE STORY EVEN IF IT WAS SHORT AND DANGED IF THEY DIDN'T DO A HALFWAY DECENT JOB ON IT

Dread (2009) UK/US

First let me clarify: This is not Judge Dredd, this is not the abysmal movie The Dread (2007) reviewed 3/1/13, this is a movie adaptation of a creepy short story by Clive Barker (Hellraiser). Barker is one of my all time fave horror writers and I remembered how weirded out I got when I first read this story. I mean, ewww weirded out. Of course they had to stretch out the story (and slow it down quite a bit) to make it into a full length movie, but they're always doing that to Stephen King's stuff so why not? 

If you want to find the story (and a lot of other great creeped-out tales) get Barkers Books Of Blood which has been out there, like, forever and you'll recognize a couple of other movies made from it, such as Book Of Blood (2009) - the first movie I think I've ever watched that was from a PROLOGUE to a book instead of a short story. Another you'll recognize that came from that series is Candyman (1992) with Virginia Madsen and Tony Todd, setting off Todd's career as a scary figure who only has to growl at you to send you running. 

This particular story came from volume two of the set - I read those books so many times I had to get new copies, they're just... my kind of horror. And, mind you, this is nasty stuff. We're not talking chainsaw killers, we're not talking paranormal garbage - just human needs and fears. And it was filmed in Boston - strange for an English story but hey, it works.

First we have Quaid. He's already massively damaged because he had seen is parents killed by an ax murderer (hey wait - no, never mind it wasn't a chainsaw and they weren't teenagers) so by the time he's in college he's massively crazy but hides it just enough to blend, I guess. I can relate.

Meanwhile we have Stephen (Jackson Rathbone, who to me looks like a shaggy young Johnny Depp here but you'd probably know him better as Jasper in the Twilight saga) who is doing a 'Fear Study' as a project. He wants to know what scares people. He also suffered a loss - his brother died in an auto accident while drunk and Stephen feels guilty, wondering if he should have driven, maybe his brother would have lived. 

His friend Cheryl had been sexually molested by her pig father who worked in a meat packing plant. She cannot even stand the smell of meat much less eat it. I feel the same way about liver and smelt and rabbit and... ahem. Anyway, it seems that these three should be their own project as they're more damaged than the students they're interviewing. But they need the grade.

Quaid however doesn't give a damn about the grade, he wants to know what other people will do with the situations they most fear. He wants more than people being afraid of something, he wants their dread, their utmost and total pants-wetting type of situations. Stephen thinks the study is done but Quaid is just getting started. Despite being an orphan he not only has money for college but a house too. I sometimes wonder about these kind of setups.

Of course since they had to expand this to a movie, there are changes - people have been added to the mix like one student who had been rendered deaf in an accident when he was five and stayed that way for months. In the book, that also is Stephen but here it's a student named Joshua. Also added is a friend of Stephen, Abby, who has a port wine stain birthmark from head to foot on one side. Needless to say these character all have fear but they're not 'giving up' the dread that Quaid is looking for, to, I guess, conquer his own about the killer of his parents, who was never caught, coming back for him.

He does a halfway decent job of keeping the insanity in check - until the night he decides to dump all his medications. From then the nightmares, the hallucinations, the fear rip into him until he is massively insane. And I guess he wants to spread the joy. First he tires of hearing what he feels are fake fears (one even did fake hers) and it sends him into a rage and he busts up all of their recording equipment, essentially ruining the project. From there it's about to get much, much worse.

At first Quaid seems sorry, he even takes a backup copy of the thesis they'd been working on and turned it in, getting him, Stephen and Cheryl a good grade. Stephen mistakenly thinks that Quaid is sincere and realizes his own fears had made him mental. Nope. He had painted a full length nude of Abby as 'normal' (her words), then puts up a tape on the school TV system of the painting as he strokes dark marks down one side, as her body really is. He then tricks Joshua to come over to his house, knocks him out and when he comes to, shoots his ears (Which apparently is enough to deafen him but not kill him? This part kind of was confusing.). This regresses him to when he was deaf as a child and he screams for his mother.

Meanwhile Abby goes nuts and takes bleach and steel wool to the bathtub, trying to 'scrub' the skin to make it normal - which puts her in the hospital. Which is also where Joshua ends up. After finding them, Stephen decides to end it for good - he knows Quaid's fear and uses it. He takes an ax and drags it slowly up to where Stephen's bedroom is (that's the sound he heard as he watched his parents being slaughtered). But Quaid overcomes his dread (too insane I guess) and captures Stephen. Stephen now gets to see Quaid's little 'experiment' with Stephen's girlfriend Cheryl.

He kidnaps Cheryl and puts her in a blocked up room. There's nothing in there but a bucket (yup, that's the toilet), some water and a plate with a cooked steak on it. Cheryl in her terror has backed into the corner as far away from the meat as she can get. As the hours go by she slowly goes mad, alternately talking to herself and scraping her skin and hair for invisible bugs. She resists going near the meat for almost a week. Finally, although by now it is crawling with maggots she eats the whole thing.

This is where the book and the movie split quite widely. In the movie they needed a quick ending so we've got Joshua sneaking into the house - he grabs the ax but instead of killing Quaid, he hits Stephen and kills him. Quaid then kills Joshua. He then drags Stephen down to where he's been keeping Cheryl (he lied when he said he let her go) and leaves the body in the room with a knife saying 'Let's see how hungry you have to be to get through that.' He leaves her sobbing, since she knows that inevitably, she WILL eat him.

The book was much more elegant but perhaps a little too complicated to convert to a screenplay. Basically since this is mostly about Stephen and Quaid, the two of them fight and Quaid, by exposing and overloading Stephen with his fears manages to reduce him to a quivering, insane child. But Stephen, finding the ax finally gives Quaid his due. The end of the story has Stephen slowly chopping pieces off of Quaid, who now knows his worst fear is going to last quite a while before darkness comes...

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