Week 13 (Sept 13 – 19) – Cult Movies: Oh, you thought I meant the other kind of cult movies? Sacrifices to the gods of entertainment must be made, so hop up on the altar!
Clive Barker directed and wrote this, based on his story “The Last Illusion” from the Books of Blood, which introduced Barker’s occult detective Harry D’Amour. Scott Bakula plays him, and he already has some experience with the supernatural, as his body is tattooed with protective symbols.
The Puritan, a man named William Nix (Daniel von Bargen), actually has occult powers and has gathered his cult in the desert to sacrifice a woman. Former cult members Philip Swann (Kevin J. O’Connor) and Caspar Quaid (Joseph Latimore) stop him, binding his face with a mask, then burying him in an unmarked grave. Decades later, D’Amour meets Quaid, who is soon killed by two of Nix’s followers, Butterfield (Barry Del Sherman) and Ray Miller (Jordan Marder), but not before he warns him that The Puritan is returning.
Phillip’s wife Dorothea (Famke Janssen) hires D’Amour to protect her husband, who is murdered on stage while doing his magic act. After going to the Magic Castle, D’Amour learns that Phillip was using real magic in his act that he had been taught by Nix. Of course, in this kind of film noir, our hero ends up sleeping with the femme fatale, who turns out to be the young girl Swann and Quaid saved from being sacrificed. And as things go, Swann isn’t really dead, and a battle for the end of the world is at hand.
MGM cut this to pieces, and Barker said, “It’s not twelve and a half minutes of blood and gore that was removed; it’s actually the thematic guts of the movie. What MGM/UA did, and I’ll think they’re wrong till the end of my days, was say that this isn’t enough of a horror movie; we want to make it more intense. It was a bad commercial decision in my view. They wanted to take out some of the detective elements. I said no. Part of the point of the movie is that it is a genre-breaking movie. It moves from film noir to horror and back and forth, and that’s what makes the movie work.”
Near the end of his life, Lucio Fulci always spoke highly of Barker. Maybe that’s why the last shot in this movie looks like The Beyond. At the end of Voices from Beyond, Fulci left this in the credits: “This film is dedicated to my few real friends, in particular to Clive Barker and Claudio Carabba.”
