The cold open is one for the ages: Three ex-cultists, led by Swann (Kevin J. O'Connor), wander into their ex-compound with shotguns looking for Nix, their levitating, fire-juggling ex-messiah (Daniel von Bargen) to rescue a little girl. After a short confrontation, Swann and co. shoot him multiple times. Knowing a few bullets aren't going to do much against the dishevelled magician, Swann's come prepared with a very cool looking iron gimp mask to bind Nix - one that requires it to be screwed against its recipient's flesh. It's immediately clear that you're in a movie from the mind that spewed forth Hellraiser into the world.
Then the movie jumps to New York thirteen years later to follow Harry D'Amour (Scott Bacula), a hard-boiled detective whose cases seem to always run up against the occult; He's introduced in the middle of some sort of scandal after some sort of mess with a possessed kid.
When he's offered an insurance fraud investigation (hello, In the Mouth of Madness!) case in a LA, it seems like good way to make a clean break from the media shitstorm.
No such luck. That investigation soon gets sidetracked when D'Amour runs into a murder in progress: A heterochromic fey man (Barry Del Sherman), whom we last saw fleeing the cult compound in the prologue, and a crony are busy sticking scalpels into a fortune reader whom we also last saw in the prologue, accompanying Swann. The detective chases the murderers off and gets some cryptic information from the victim before he expires. (Also present at the murder scene: the ten of swords card from the Waite-Smith tarot deck, which shows a man being skewered by ten blades. Cute.) Then the police arrive and, just like that, Harry D'Amour is again in the front pages involved in more occult shit.
This captures the eye of Dorothea (Famke Jenssen in her big-screen debut), the beautiful trophy bride of our boy Swann, who's now a big-time illusionist with shows in Vegas and everything. She hires D'amour because she's worried that her husband, who insists on his 'magic' being just tricks, is acting particularly weird lately.
Things quickly spin out of control when Swann has a very messy, very public, very foreshadowed death (that is one load-bearing Waite-Smith tarot card!). You'll surely be surprised to learn that the whole Nix situation from the prologue was not, as everyone thought, done and dusted.
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| Only nine swords, though. Tut tut. |
Clive Barker directs, produces (along with JoAnne Sellar, who's since produced Paul Thomas Anderson movies almost exclusively) and writes, adapting his own story The Last Illusion. The film only shares the premise, characters and some details with its source, but in expanding it to feature length Barker crafted a hugely entertaining script full of great lines, bizarre ideas, and a punchy pacing that juggles investigation and horror beats expertly. The narrative line never falters, despite detouring into some weird spaces and being fueled by a couple of truly out-there character motivations.
It's this seamless stitching of sun-drenched neo-noir detective story and weird supernatural horror that to my mind puts this so far ahead of similar stories like Angel Heart or Cast a Deadly Spell. The finale gets maybe a little too strange for the way the plot has been superficially set up - I can see how people could find it underwhelming, but I'm very much on-board with the non-standard resolution.
It looks great, too. It never develops a distinct visual identity like Hellraiser did, but it's slick and handles its many disparate elements unobtrusively (cinematographer: Rohn Schmidt). The physical makeup and gore effects are as good as you'd hope, though there aren't that many of them and they're fairly restrained by Barker's standards. The design work is also excellent, and while some of the early CG looked pretty cheesy even when it came out, the concepts on display are bizarre enough that it doesn't really matter.
As for its sound... well, it sounds like Hellraiser* - so much so I was surprised the soundtrack is not by Christopher Young, but by Simon Boswell (who's a legend in his own right). I wonder if Barker requested it that way or if Boswell voluntarily gave a Young impression.
Bakula's never been better, giving a deeply sympathetic, relatable but quietly badass performance, and femme fatales don't get any more... well, femme than Famke Janssen; She doesn't get to do much but as far as looks go, I like her much better here than in Goldeneye, which hit theaters a few months after this.
O'Connor doesn't leave that much of an impression, but Del Sherman does with his weirdly feral bundle of queer menace as the main heavy. I also really liked Von Bagen as another deeply unorthodox character: more hobo than saviour, more self-absorbed than menacing - and one of a long line of Barker villains who wants to destroy the world not because he's on a power trip, but just because he deeply despises it. It's just that he just doesn't want to be alone at the end of everything, a pretty sympathetic goal all in all.
Sadly the movie did not do very well in theaters, and Barker would never direct another film. Some severe studio interference led to a bunch of important connective tissue as well as a little sex and gore getting cut out - this is one of the cases where the director's cut improves on the film dramatically (pun intended). Barker's gone on record saying that having to deal with this sort of shit was a big factor in why he stopped making movies, so... thanks a bunch, UA.
Lord of Illusions doesn't pack the same wallop as Hellraiser or Nightbreed, partly by design - it spends too much time on its detective story to go as far out there as the other two movies do - but it's still very much of a piece with them, part of an oeuvre that almost qualifies as outsider art, given the oblique angle at which Barker tackled genre filmmaking.
In a better world we would have a Harry D'Amour trilogy, maybe a TV series, but I guess this introduction was a little too ahead for its time. It'd play a little better now, probably, and I honestly think Barker, and the way his imagination (however slightly) tweaked pop culture towards weirdness, is a not insignificant factor in that.
I fucking love this movie.
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| A David Bowie impersonator and a Queensÿche fan walk into a theatre... |
*:In case it's not clear, that's a compliment.
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