Lord Of Illusions
When popular horror writers decide to take the chance of becoming a director in order to adapt their own material into a movie, there’s no real telling just how exactly it’s going to turn out. Stephen King himself would take the plunge only one time and the result was Maximum Overdrive which was (depending on how you look at it) either a disastrous train wreck or a work of nihilistically underrated genius (King certainly thought of it as being the former). Then there is Clive Barker, arguably King’s most highly regarded contemporary in the field of horror literature who himself casually stepped behind the camera in 1987 to adapt his own novel The Hellbound Heart. The result? Hellraiser, an immediate grand slam success and instant horror classic in which Barker while writing the script had slyly made some key character and plot changes from his own original story and wound up making something even better in cinematic form than it had been in literary. With the horror community in full support of him continuing his work in film (and an alleged endorsement from King himself that Barker was “the future of horror”), Barker moved on to direct Nightbreed, his full on monster epic with loads of latex endowed creatures being portrayed in an heroic light, only for him to be forced to make key edits against his wishes and then watch as the movie was mismarketed as being a straight up slasher flick (of which certain elements were accurate in that regard but the whole monsterfest angle was played down in the advertising). Barker was shaken, but nonetheless moved on to what would be his third and final effort as a movie director in 1995, an adaptation (the first to date) of a series of stories that he had done featuring a hard boiled private detective named Harry D’Amour whose “gimmick” so to speak was that he was a Phillip Marlowe or Sam Spade type of oldschool gumshoe who regardless always wound up getting involved with cases that invariably involved the strange and unusual as well as the supernatural where demons, ghosts and other dark beings would always cross his path for him to defeat. There can be little doubt that Barker was hoping to go the franchise route with this character and make a whole entire series out of his adventures, but perhaps the main mistake that would prevent that came as a result of the casting of the actual role itself: Scott Bakula is and was a fine actor whom everybody had associated with the nerdy yet well intentioned time traveling scientist Dr. Sam Beckett on Quantum Leap (with people thinking in the wrong way that Bakula was a great actor for “playing” a different person in every episode when in reality he was always playing Sam and was only pretending to be the person whom he had leapt into) but now stepping into the shoes of a hardass, hardcore, hard bitten private eye who had made a habit of facing down the supernatural on a regular basis seemed to be a bit too much of a stretch for him especially when we see Bakula engage in scenes of awkwardly drinking and spouting profanity. As interestingly as the D’Amour character is presented, having Bakula in the part just seems out of sorts even as he is presented as being the ultra masculine, alpha male of the story for which there is a specific reason for that. Much more fascinating is the series of events (apart from D’Amour) that really get the story rolling. It turns out that there is a rabidly crazy cult out in the desert that devoutly worships its leader Nix as played by character acting legend Daniel Von Bargen. Now our first introduction to the Nix character (whom we know to be the main villain) immediately elicits a chuckle of laughter as he looks to be an overweight, unemployed, drunken stepfather with way too much time on his hands, but once Von Bargen is allowed to act, he becomes quite fascinating. Turns out that Nix has magical powers that are REAL and eventually plans to use them to bring about the actual end of the world. Most of his followers though are just mindless sycophants (and he knows it) with the only disciple who means anything to him being Swann (Kevin J. O’Connor) since he has actually personally tutored him in how to achieve the near godlike ability to create real magic. Unfortunately, Swann and him are now estranged but when Nix has a young girl kidnapped (presumably for a sacrifice), Swann and a few straggler disciples come rushing back to the compound to make the save (just as Nix had hoped) and at the end of it all, Nix is shot to pieces before being “binded” which shuts him down to the point of appearing dead before Swann and the others bury him out in the middle of nowhere, hoping that he’ll be forgotten about. 13 years pass and Swann is now a rich and world famous illusionist on the level of David Copperfield all while being married to the now grown up child (Famke Janssen) whom he had saved all those years ago. The fascinating part is in the idea that Swann (like Nix) now had full knowledge of the secrets of the universe, but in becoming a performing magician and “distracting people from the banality of their lives for a few minutes”, he is actually doing the right thing and making the best use of his very real, legitimate powers since anything more than that would constitute using them for the purposes of evil (world domination). When his former friends who helped him defeat Nix all those years ago start being murdered, he hires Bakula’s D’Amour (still reeling after a harrowing experience involving an exorcism) to find out who’s behind it. That culprit turns out to be another former cult member named Butterfield (Barry Del Sherman in a completely different turn than his slimy “efficiency expert” Brad from American Beauty) who is not only committing these revenge murders but has also apparently taught himself in the intervening years the required steps for Warlock Resurrection as he personally plans to revive Nix and sends out letters to all of the other former cult members notifying them of the “reunion” (which leads to all of them gleefully abandoning their normal, everyday lives including murdering all current family members in the process). Ironically, Del Sherman’s Butterfield (who resembles a cross between a demonic Pee Wee Herman and Bob Geldof’s movie interpretation of Pink Floyd in the movie version of The Wall) winds up in many ways stealing the movie mostly for successfully acting as the Main Villain (while we wait for Von Bargen’s Nix to wake up) and for also bringing a sense of dread to the role making him into something resembling a thinking man’s freak whose own villainy is nearly separate yet equal to that of Nix when we realize that he really is doing all of this “preparation” on his own while the other followers are just sitting there awaiting the telegram. As for the Swann character (from whose point of view the story would have been far more interesting than from D’Amour’s), it should come as no surprise that since Kevin J. O’Connor (who has made a whole career out of playing weak, wimpy characters) is once again playing a sniveling coward so well (choosing to run away rather than face the threat of Nix) that Bakula’s D’Amour (quickly recognized by Butterfield as being a threat to his plans simply because of his past) basically assumes the mantle of being the masculine hero simply for no other reason than the fact that the story just needs one so bad. This can be seen not only in the way that Bakula pushes around Swann and a nearly worthless personal assistant character (Joel Swetow) who gets way too much screen time and usually just acts as a mouthpiece for O’Connor’s Swann who is spending most of the film in hiding, but also in the way that he readily seduces and then screws Famke Janssen’s Mrs. Swann (apparently Swann had married her to protect her from Nix and never consummated the relationship for reasons unknown). We do get a nice cameo from Vincent Schviavelli as the leader of a group of “real” magicians and when Von Bargen as Nix finally reenters the movie, we get a different take from him than expected when it comes to his philosophy (a refreshing one), caring little about his own loyal followers and more about the one who had betrayed him (Swann) since he’s the one that he has literally shared all of his secrets with and thus the only one he still wants at his side for world domination. Even with Bakula in the mix playing the necessary hero in all of this, the story elements still remain strong enough to score this as a creative success for Barker complete with good villains…
8/10