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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Holy Crap! A Movie That Didn't Suck - Entirely

The Pact (2012)

Finding a halfway decent movie so close to finding the gem Saint Ange was a long shot, but this one fit the bill. The title really didn't though - they never really explain it, but this is a decent crime/thriller with of course your supernatural bent to it since that is what sells right now.

Dead bitch, err I mean lady...

We start with a woman Nicole who is trying to get her mother's things in order after her death. She is trying to get her sister to help her, but apparently this woman made both their lives hell, and the younger one isn't willing to just forget and let it go to give this bitch a proper funeral. So the older one is there herself, when (Sigh, can they PLEASE think of something original when the 'creepy' stuff starts?) lights start to flicker, she hears banging and footsteps. 

She's not so easy to scare though, and instead Skypes her cousin (Is that how you put that? I don't know anything about this new stuff.) to talk to her daughter. Reception isn't so great there (ah, the blessings of WiFi) so the video and audio keep cutting out. Finally she gets to a place where she can see and talk to the kid, just in time for her daughter to ask, 'Who's that standing behind you?' She whirls around, nobody there and the connection is lost. She's staring at a closet, apparently a place both girls spent quite a bit of their childhood against their will, and slowly walks toward it...

Damn, I guess I'm the one stuck in this movie...

A few days later her younger sister Annie is arguing with her cousin Liz, who's worried that Nicole hasn't come back for her kid. Apparently, both sisters have an adult history of just bailing when things get tough - can't help it, from the way they were raised. To be sure, the three of them go to the house, stay and go to her mother's funeral (sparsely attended, the woman was NOT popular) and it is revealed for no reason whatsoever that Annie has one blue eye and one green eye. Oookay. 

The three spend the night in the house. Annie is disturbed that all of Nicole's stuff seems to still be at the house, including her car. She tries calling her, and hears a phone ringing in the closet... opening it, she just finds it on the floor, nothing else. It has a strange photo on it (hate these smart phones, they look like so much hassle to use). 

That night she has a nightmare and breaks a picture of her mother accidentally... which is a folded picture with another pregnant woman posed next to her. What is it with this stupid thing of folding pictures for frames? If there's something you don't want to see you cut it off for crying out loud... There's the flickering, banging, stomping and Annie is checking the house when she is picked up and thrown against a wall - then dragged - then thrown again. 

This is a hell of a lot more stuff than you find in an entire PA movie... finally it stops and not finding Liz she runs out of the house to get the hell out... but hears a child crying and realizes she has to go back for her niece. She grabs her and runs to the police station - who of course thinks she's a nutburger, pretty much like her older sister. She meets a detective Creek (Casper Van Diem) who claims he wants to help.

Hey it's Mulder and Scully... wait...

But in douchebag police style he thinks she is the one that caused the two women to disappear. Nice. But he agrees to help anyway, and that night, not going near the house again, she stays at a motel. She keeps having disjointed dreams that may be memories but she has no idea - but the address of the picture with the woman on her sister's phone (which matches the dress the woman was wearing in the picture with her mother - apparently the only dress she owned) is real and she wants to check it out. 

I don't know if panties are street legal...

The dreams make her freak, and having nothing but a motorcycle she finds herself on it ready to bolt when a little girl tells her she has to wear a helmet - and she realizes she's sitting on the thing in just panties and a t-shirt. Ouch. Later as Annie goes through the papers her mother left behind she conveniently finds a blueprint to their house - which does NOT match the house she lived in. 

She takes the cop with her and breaking through a wall finds a door to another bedroom. She swears she has no memory of this room ever being here. Cop is no help, so who do we go to? That was rhetorical of course - in these movies they always look for a psychic.

If I had a personality I wouldn't have to be a psychic...

In this case it's creepy Stevie, a girl she knew in high school who 'has the power' or some dumb thing like that. In the hidden room, Stevie has a hysterical fit, repeating the name 'Judas'. They then see the corpse of a woman in a floral dress floating above them and Annie now realizes it is not her bitch mother's spirit that is haunting the house. They run like the wind, realizing that women in ugly house dresses might be all over the place for all they know...

Annie searches the word Judas online. This is kind of funny, because even though the screen is an exact copy, instead of 'Google' it says 'Global' - guess they didn't want to have to pay any royalties... which leads her to a page for Judas, a serial killer (What, no Lady Gaga? That video is a killer - pun intended...). The killer's last known victim was Jennifer Glick, and Annie identifies her as the woman in the floral dress with her mother in the photo. 

Annie goes to the address that keeps appearing on her phone (a Catholic school) and discovers photos of her mother and Jennifer together, realizing that the cross she owns, given to her by her mother, originally belonged to Jennifer. Why? Who the hell knows and by now if they don't pick up the story we're not going to care. Yes this woman, this abuser with secrets, was a devout Catholic, go figure. In the photos is also a man listed with the same last name as Annie's mother. 

Meanwhile going by himself in movie cop duh style, Creek returns 'cause one of his photos shows something off so of course he investigates without telling anyone and oops, he's killed. Bye Creek. You were worthless. Meanwhile back at the farm.... uh the Catholic school she asks about her uncle and finds that there's no records of him after 1980 so... now her devout mother was not only abusive and nasty, but housed a serial killer she damn well knew killed her friend. 

So... off we go again into the wild psychic yonder since normal help in these types of movies won't do (and somehow the murderer was extra spiffy 'cause she didn't find any of Creek's blood and there was a lot). Not having a Parker Brothers Ouija Board (ages 3 and up) on her, she writes with a black marker on the floor (naughty naughty) and uses her, I mean Jennifer's cross as the planchette. It works which freaks her out (Isn't that what you wanted? Make up your bloody mind...). Yeah, Jennifer's been 'warning' her by throwing her around like a rag doll. Yeah she's dead. Yeah Judas did it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, blah blah blah... sorry. When they get to these boogeyman type of tactics it just takes away from what is actually a halfway decent mystery movie.

Suddenly she hears a noise and hides. Judas come up from the floor through a secret hatch. He leaves the room through the cupboard door and is heard crying. Annie looks down where he came from and (urp) there's Creek's body. Hating to touch him (hey, he can't help being dead) she grabs his gun. Her flashlight goes out and she tries her lighter and we know what's gonna come next and it does... the flickering light reveals her sister's head tacked on a wall. Double urp. 

Ghost moves her to the gun but can't shoot it herself?

Judas hears Annie and attacks her, tying her up. Annie breaks her hands free but Judas slashes her on the shoulder with a knife. As Annie breaks free, Jennifer's spirit pulls her away from Judas (how convenient, start calling her Casper - whoops, that was the cop, sorry) and to the gun, which Annie uses to shoot Judas. Staring at his dead body, Annie sees that Judas has one blue eye and one green eye, just like she and her mother. What the bloody hell does different colored eyes have to do with the price of rice in China or anything about this movie I mean... sorry, back to the story.

At the end, Annie has gained full custody of Nicole's daughter, Eva. With Liz and Nicole dead, the house has been sold and is being remodeled. The inevitable twist? You see in one of the holes in the wall of the house Judas' eye looking through... and one eye is blue and one is green. Ick, does that mean he was her father? And, uh isn't he dead and out of there? Ohhhh, right. Supernatural boogeyman bullshit. Forgot, sorry. Other than the stupid parts this was actually not a bad mystery and would have been much better if they had played it straight and kept the PA element out of it.