From the ‘70s to the millennium, fright specialist Wes Craven seemed to reboot, or at least refresh, the horror genre every decade. (Eventually doing remakes of his own stuff.) But this Haitian/Voodoo/Living Dead number leaves him stylistically stranded. How serious was he about all this back-from-the-dead scientific blather? How seriously did he want us to consider it between high blown pseudo-scientific jargon and primitive ‘native’ dance rituals? Bill Pullman, with only RUTHLESS PEOPLE/’86 and SPACEBALLS/’87 behind him, is a Great White Hunter type with a test tube instead of a rifle, an anthropologist on the hunt not for wildlife, but for wild chemistry. So, when he gets financial backing from Big Pharma, he heads to the tropics to find the magic powder of Life and Death. A task complicated by destabilized Haitian politics, corrupt police & dangerous local Witch Doctors. Craven seems to know he’s bitten off more than he can chew, smothering it all with exotic dance, violence and general drug-induced hysteria & hallucinations. Leaving both victims and film buried alive. For Craven, it was back to all those profitable NIGHTMAREs and SCREAMs.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/DOUBLE-BILL: Serve your zombie æsthetic lyrically with I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE/’43; and anthropologically with EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT/’15. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-walked-with-zombie-1943.html https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/01/el-abrazo-de-la-serpiente-embrace-of.html
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