NIGHTBREED

Clive Barker, 1990
Starring: Craig Sheffer, Anne Bobby, David Cronenberg, Charles Haid, Doug Bradley

Written and directed by Clive Barker, Nightbreed is one of those magically nostalgic films that seeped its way into my consciousness at an early age. Though the film is far from perfect, it's a lovely, melancholic fairytale full of monsters, prophecies, and other worlds where gods and magic still exist. I think it's probably what Pan's Labyrinth is trying to be, but for an earlier generation. I love it. If you haven't seen it yet, don't expect insane wonders, because I am, at least a little, reviewing it through the rose colored glasses of childhood and those special formative film-viewing years.

Based on Clive Barker's novella Cabal, the film relates the tale of Boone (the Stephen Dorff-esque Craig Sheffer), a troubled young man with even more troubling nightmares. In his extremely vivid dreams, Boone looses all sense of time and visits a strange town called Midian, which is populated by monsters and bizarre creatures called the Nightbreed. Boone seeks out the help of a psychiatrist, Decker (the terrifying David Cronenberg), who is actually a psychotic serial killer slaughtering whole families at a time.

Decker pins the crimes on Boone, who flees, frightened and confused. Only his loyal girlfriend Lori (Anne Bobby) believes he is innocent. He runs to where he thinks he will find Midian, located underneath a cemetery out in the country. Followed by Decker and Lori, he finds something he only half hoped was real: the monster world of his dreams. He struggles to find a place among them and wonders why he has been called there, while trying to protect Lori and Midian from true evil at the same time.

When the film was released it was something of a disaster. It was given a large budget, five times that of Hellraiser, but it was poorly promoted and suffered from a lot of cuts to Barker's initial print. In the original trailer they took out all reference to the monsters and made it seem like some sort of slasher film. Apparently Clive Barker flipped a shit and I don't blame him. The original cut, which was allegedly about two and half hours long, was cut down to a scant hour and forty minutes after Barker went back in and shot additional footage to solve some continuity problems.

There are great effects for the time period, a magical set, a good Danny Elfman score and lovely costumes. As I mentioned, the script has some development and continuity problems, but character does comes through strongly, particularly the love story. It's full of wonder and sadness that I think is probably further developed in the full director's cut. A "lost" version was recently found on VHS that contains an hour of the missing footage. It was shown last year at a horror convention and I'm hoping sometime soon we'll get to see a commercial release of this, or at least something available to audiences. Some of this extra footage is up on Clive's Revelations website.

I'm reviewing the bare bones DVD release. Hopefully something new and wonderful will replace it in the next two years or at least they'll give it a proper plastic case and not that cardboard piece of shit I have on my shelf now.

Update: Shout Factory kindly released the Director's Cut on DVD and Blu-ray, which was also streaming on Netflix for a time. It's great to finally be able to see the complete film, which fills out much of the story, even if it doesn't resolve all the film's flaws.

LORD OF ILLUSIONS

Clive Barker, 1995
Starring: Scott Bakula, Famke Janssen, Kevin J. O'Connor, J. Trevor Edmond

I haven't really thought until recently about how big of an impact Clive Barker has had on me. It seems obvious, but I was growing up and discovering horror around the end of his major burst of film work. Hellraiser, Nightbreed, Candyman, etc. I was old enough to be scared by his films and fiction, which is something I can't say of many people other than David Cronenberg. And fortunately my dad is a huge Clive fan (yes, we're on a first name basis), so he was an artist on the edge of my consciousness much earlier than he otherwise would have been.

Lord of Illusions, for some reason, is a film I didn't get around to seeing until recently. I'd heard a lot of mixed things about it and it just sort of slipped under my radar. I was pleasantly surprised. It's a flawed film, but definitely belongs in the Clive canon. Written, directed, and co-produced by him, it has many of the pleasures of his earlier works -- tortured protagonists, sexual menace, monstrous humanoids, and the thirst for forbidden knowledge. It also has beautiful set pieces and cinematography. Lord of Illusions is along the lines of the some of the later John Carpenter films in the sense that it's flawed, but remains dark, creepy, and fun. ...And it has SCOTT BAKULA. I don't know how I missed that Bakula was in it, but I love him thanks to hours of Quantum Leap in my childhood.

Lord of Illusions is based on Clive's short story "The Last Illusion" from the Books of Blood. Down on his luck private eye, Harry D'Amour, is hired to go to L.A. and track down some insurance fraud. Instead, he gets mixed up in the world of Swann, a famous illusionist, and stays to investigate Swann's apparent death when one of his illusions goes horribly wrong. He also wants to nail Swann's wife, the young and very hot Famke Janssen. It turns out that Swann was using real magic in his illusions, which he learned from a scary magician/cult leader named Nix. Nix lost control and Swann was forced to kill him. As you might imagine, some of Nix's old followers hatch a plan to bring him back and let him wreak havoc and revenge.

I would definitely recommend Lord of Illusions to all Clive Barker fans, but don't set your hopes too high. It's not Hellraiser. My chief complaint is that the film tries a bit too hard with the magic and the special effects are not advanced enough to catch up. Barker does a great job combining film noir and the supernatural. There are a lot of similarities between Lord of Illusions and Angel Heart. The Harry D'Amour character, strangely, is also almost exactly like an American John Constantine from the Hellblazer comics. Coincidence? I have no idea.

I'm reviewing the director's cut, which you should make sure to see. It's 11 minutes longer than the cut-to-shit theatrical release and contains one of the best and most chilling scenes in the film. The former cult members resurface, dispassionately kill their families, and set out to the desert to welcome Nix's resurrection.

On a final note, I think one of my favorite things about Barker's films is that they are pretty well critically received and remain genre films with a toe in the mainstream, but they also have unabashedly gay elements. I'd love more of that across the board in horror, which tends to be a genre steeped in normative heterosexuality. For instance, it's a breath of fresh air that one of Lord of Illusion's characters -- Butterfield, played by a fantastically reptilian Barry del Sherman -- wears gold snake-skin pants.