Lord of Illusions

31 Days of Horror, post 12

I have had an odd interest in Lord of Illusions ever since it was released in theaters, back in 1995.  I haven't read the novella that the story is based on.  I am not a fan of Clive Barker's movies.  In fact, the only reason I am aware of this film at all is because it was heavily advertised in the comic books I read as a teen.  At the time, I had never seen a horror movie, but there was something about the title and advertisement that drew me in.  In a way, it was inevitable that I would track Lord of Illusions down and finally watch it.  However, my knowledge of movies in general (and horror movies in particular) immediately points out some potential weak points in this film.  For starters, the villain is the bad guy from Super Troopers and Scott Bakula is neither traveling through time or playing football with Kathy Ireland.  Hmm.  This one might get painful.

Lord of Illusions begins with a statement that there are two types of magic; one is illusions, the other is magic as reality, which can be powerful and make death an illusion.  Which would then be the other type of magic, I guess?  The story opens with a group of friends entering a secluded building in the middle of a desert.  They are there to put an end to Nix (Daniel von Bargen), a cult leader who professes to have magical powers.

Fire is nice, but real magic would give you a longer T-shirt

The interlopers were actually once followers of Nix, but realized that he is evil/batshit crazy, so they decide to kill him.  They don't do a good job, but a fluke of timing and circumstance leaves Nix with a bullet wound in his head and various other perforations.  But he's still not dead, because MAGIC!  The rebel leader, Swann (Kevin J. O'Connor), pulls out a sort of Vic Rattlehead S&M mask and screws it into Nix's face.  Team Killcult then decide to bury Nix so deep no one can ever find him.  Meanwhile, Nix's Number One toadie, Butterfield (played by J. Trevor Edmond and Barry Del Sherman), does his best his best Gamorrean impression.

And all of that was just the prologue!  Jump forward thirteen years and meet Detective Harry D'Amour (Scott Bakula), a hard-boiled private investigator with a nose for the supernatural.  While working another job, Harry stumbles across a dead body and winds up fighting the presumed killer.  It turns out that the corpse is one of the people who helped kill Nix.  When news of his fellow murderer-for-a-good-cause dying reaches Swann, his wife, Dorothea (Famke Janssen), decides to hire Harry to investigate the death because they think that Butterfield and other Nix-lovers are behind the murder.  And hiring a private investigator when you think you know the guilty party is better than telling the police because...?  Oh, and in the future, Swann is the most famous magician in the world.

Now you know where Criss Angel stole his act

Harry agrees to take their case and attends Swann's next magic spectacular with Dorothea.  During the show, something goes wrong and Swann dies.  What's with all the killing?  Well, it seems that Butterfield is trying to resurrect Nix, which naturally means that he is putting the only people who know enough to stop him on their guard.  So what can Harry do?  If you said, "Try to avert the resurrection of a evil warlock," then you might just be on to something.

The acting in Lord of Illusions tends to be a little campy, but isn't too bad.  Scott Bakula was miscast as the grim noir-ish hero; he works against his strengths here, trading his signature everyman charm for pseudo-tough talk.  Famke Janssen deadpans most of her lines and wears inappropriate clothing for most of the film.

...like her Scott Bakula stole

 Kevin J. O'Connor was just plain odd; he did a pretty good job acting like a master magician, but was melodramatic in the rest of the film.  Daniel von Bargen was similarly over the top, but he did look like the product of a man's passionate love for a salamander.

Fact: Evil is moist

In fact, the only actor in the entire movie that I actually enjoyed was Barry Del Sherman.  Of all the cast members, he seemed to flourish the most under this story's campy subtext.  To put that in context, he was the most entertaining actor, despite having a wardrobe that consisted primarily of a leather vest and snakeskin pants.  Oh, and a crushed velvet shirt for the truly special occasion of resurrecting a dead magician.

Because if you're going to dress up, you've gotta go all out

The reason I don't mind the acting in Lord of Illusions is because most of the actors fit the tone of the movie pretty well.  Written and directed by Clive Barker, there are moments in this story that would have fallen completely flat if they were handled with utmost seriousness, but Barker managed to get the actors play their parts (except for Bakula) with a tiny bit of goofiness.  The choice to camp this film up, just a little bit, is what saves it from being dreadful.  This is kind of a film-noir-meets-neon-camp style, if that's a thing.  As far as Barker's direction goes, the acting and sets were a little ridiculous, but I thought the violence and gore we handled pretty well.

The special effects were also pretty imaginative; the digital effects don't look great by today's standards, but they are still clever.  I really liked the weird origami/fire thing that confronts D'Amour after he romances Dorothea.  The practical effects stand the test of time far better.  Some of them were gory, some of them included full costumes, and some were fairly subtle by comparison (like Nix's fingers entering someone's skull), but they all looked pretty good.

Maybe a little silly, too, but that's the price you pay for wearing rubber suits

My biggest problem with Lord of Illusions was Clive Barker's writing.  The story is inherently melodramatic, so I'm glad that he added some camp into his script.  That doesn't forgive the poor focus or logic.  It is obvious that Scott Bakula's character, Harry D'Amour, is the main character in the film.  He gets top billing and is the point of view character for the audience to identify with as the story gets progressively weirder.  And yet, Barker spends a lot of time making Kevin J. O'Connor look like a mysterious bad-ass.  Heck, this story doesn't even adhere to the basic idea of having the main character play the hero; D'Amour is an observer when it comes down to Swann vs. Nix.  I also don't understand the magicians in this film.  Swann kills Nix and buries him, but is afraid that Nix may someday return from the grave.  Shouldn't the script at least mention why dismembering Nix's remains and/or cremating him is not an option?  And if you're going to hide a body in a desert, shouldn't it be harder to find?  It seemed as though that was the easy part for Butterfield to accomplish.  And what was up with Nix's followers?

"Join us and get a free Summer haircut"

I can understand a charismatic guy leading a cult and convincing them to do many things.  I find it hard to believe that the exact same people would all re-enlist in the cult after thriteen years of not having a charismatic leader to guide them.  Sure, some would return, but everyone seems pretty unlikely.  And I can't comment on this movie without pointing out Nix's stated goal that earned him a cult following: "I was born to murder the world.  You can help me if you like."  Okay, one: that's a pretty awesome villain line.  Two: wait, what?!?

Lord of Illusions doesn't quite work as a straight horror film or a campy one, but balances uncomfortably between the two genres.  The strangest thing about Lord of Illusions is that it is not difficult to sit through; the sum of it's odd parts is actually halfway decent.  I have an idea.  Instead of remaking classic horror movies, filmmakers should look at a movie like this, one that has good moments but got the big picture wrong, and update this.  I can imagine a version of Lord of Illusions that falls a lot closer to Angel Heart than Dracula A.D. 1972.  Then, maybe, we could enjoy a horror movie about magic that isn't mediocre at best.

 

X-Men

Doesn't the tagline "Trust a Few, Fear the Rest" kind of go against the movie's message?

As the release of the X-Men franchise reboot/re-imagining/origin story, X-Men: First Class, rapidly approaches, I thought it would be interesting to re-watch X-Men and see how the ball got rolling.

To understand this movie, you have to accept that there has been a genetic trend in human births over the last sixty or so years that has allowed a tiny minority of people to be born with genetic mutations.  I'm not talking about your normal defects or abnormalities, though.

Ugly is not a super-power.

These mutations give extraordinary powers to otherwise normal people.  The powers range quite a bit, from the ability to control weather or magnetism to fast healing or being irresistible to women.

Hell-lloooo, ladies!

Can you buy into all that?  If not, this movie is going to seem a little silly.  Well, mutants (as the super-powered-by-birth are called) have apparently been trying to live normal lives, safe in their anonymity from the lynchings that can occur when people find something new to hate.  Seeing this as a dangerous status quo, Senator Kelly (Bruce Davidson) proposes legislation that will require all mutants to register themselves and their abilities with the US Government, essentially treating them as weapons.  Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) believes that Senator Kelly is frightened of what he doesn't understand, but that the general public will see the legislation as the bigoted mess it is.  His take on the situation is to protect humanity from angry mutants and things will get better.  Magneto (Ian McKellan), who survived German concentration camps, sees this as another attempt to wipe "his people" off the face of the planet.  Understandably, he decides to take a more offensive approach to this problem.  Both men have followers willing to fight for these two opposing ideologies, but the first steps toward a genetic war come when a runaway teen, Rogue (Anna Paquin), and a metal-boned and -clawed tough guy, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), suddenly pop up on the radars of Xavier and Magneto.

Man, the cast of X-Men is good!  Mostly.  Well, Hugh Jackman is perfect in the lead role as Wolverine, at the very least.  Angry and tough, yet confused and surprisingly caring, Jackman brought the iconic character to life.  Ian McKellan was great as the villainous Magneto, but it wasn't his nastiness that made him so appealing; McKellan succeeded in the always difficult task of making a bad guy sympathetic.  Patrick Stewart was also good as Xavier, and not just because he looks exactly like the comic character.  Stewart's eloquence and British accent helped make the almost saintly nature of Xavier plausible --- if only the screenwriters could have found a way for his character to not get sidelined in the movie, then we could have seen his kindness tested.

The rest of the cast was definitely supporting, when compared to those three.  Anna Paquin was solid as Rogue, and she managed to not be annoying or whiny in a role that could have easily swung that way.  I think James Marsden doesn't get enough credit for his work as Cyclops; yes, playing the uptight guy is pretty easy, but he and Jackman had a lot of chemistry with their verbal barbs.  Famke Janssen was completely acceptable as Jean Grey, even if the love triangle that formed around her was pretty underdeveloped.  Halle Berry, on the other hand, was truly wretched as Storm.  Pick an accent, already, lady!  It doesn't help matters that she delivered the absolute worst line in the whole movie: "Do you know what happens when a toad is struck by lightning?  The same thing that happens to everything else."  That's just terrible.

Two non-masturbation things that make you go blind: bad acting and bangs.

On the other hand, I liked Shawn Ashmore's performance as Iceman, even if it was steeped a little too heavily in teen melodrama.  As for the bad guys, Ray Park was pretty cool as Toad, even if he's just a green-painted stuntman.  I thought Rebecca Romijn looked pretty hot in her ridiculously naked "costume," and the special effects made her character seem awesome.  When you look a little closer, though, you realize that she almost never spoke and most of her "acting" involved her looking sexy.  Well, that's good enough for most people, I guess.

Not the most attractive "O" face, but I'll take it.

I was pretty disappointed in Tyler Mane's Sabretooth, though.  A lack of interesting dialogue, an over-reliance on wires to show off his super-strength and super-jumping (?) abilities, and a generally awful character design combined to make Sabretooth pretty lame.  And that's a shame, since --- in the comics, which are obviously not the movies --- he's basically Wolverine minus the conscience. 

Plucking and threading aren't enough...grab a mower to tame those brows!

Bryan Singer did a great job directing this film, with the exception of letting Halle Berry use a terrible accent (sometimes).  This is a character-driven movie, where these potentially silly and melodramatic mutants are seen as people instead of excuses for special effects.  That is what makes this movie so important.  Keep in mind that the last major super-hero movies before this were the too-violent-for-kids Blade and the awful Batman & Robin; if X-Men didn't deliver to a wide audience, you can be sure that Spider-Man and Batman Begins would not have been made (at least not in this decade).  I appreciated a lot of the choices made by Singer and his production team, too.  The black leather costumes keep the guffaws of implausibility away much longer than comic book costumes would have.  Making Wolverine the main character and leaving a lot of his history unexplained/under-explained gave his character (who is otherwise kind of un-invested in Xavier's team) motivation and a character arc.  The tone of the film is perhaps Singer's greatest legacy on this movie, as well as for all post-2000 comic book movies.  This feels like a science fiction film instead of an adaptation of a childish medium.

Hugh Jackman always has time to entertain with a Tonys-related tale.

The movie is not perfect, though.  Magneto's secret hideout is located in an island prison with no walkways between the cells?  Exactly where would that be?  The pace is a little slow, and nothing truly thrilling ever happens; it does an admirable job of setting up the premise with a fairly interesting story, so the sequel could be awesome.  The special effects are solid, but not spectacular.  What makes this movie seem more impressive is the awful development hell it went through before being made this way.  There were several script rewrites, many directors, and Hugh Jackman was cast as Wolverine after the movie had been filming for three weeks already; the actor originally signed to play the part was the awful Dougray Scott, who backed out to film Mission: Impossible II.  The film also had Joss Whedon do a dialogue-fixing rewrite for one of the older, stupider scripts; his script allegedly only had two lines make the final movie --- Storm's lightning and toads line and the one where Wolverine calls Cyclops a dick, the worst and best (respectively) lines of the movie.  When you think of the other Marvel Comics movies that had been made before this (the Dolph Lungren Punisher and the rubber-eared Captain America) and how easily this film could have been made into something like them, I think X-Men deserves some respect.  And it helps that it's a good movie.

I should also point out that I am a ridiculously big X-Men comics fan (like, 30+ solid years of collecting big), so I know good and bad X-Men stories when I see them.  Writing this review also reminded me of the awesomely cheesy (but still awesome for its time) X-Men cartoon and its cool theme music.  Adapting that theme into a symphonic film score would have made this movie near perfect for my nerdy tastes.