Note: This review is based on the Director’s Cut.

Umbrella Entertainment resurrected a forgotten flick from the mid-90s with their Blu-ray release of Lord of Illusions last year. Back in 1995, writer-director Clive Barker (Hellraiser, Nightbreed) ventured outside his normal horror otherworld playground to deliver this unconventional story that is part film noir and part supernatural fantasy thriller, but the result is all entertaining. Besides being a Barker joint, it starred an ex-Quantum Leaper, a Bond villain and a Seinfeld boss who loved making life a living hell for George Costanza!

And almost thirty years later, it indeed might be worth a revisit through fresh eyes.

A specialist in cases involving occult activity, private detective Harry D’Amour (Scott Bakula, Quantum Leap) heads to Los Angeles for what is supposed to be an easy insurance fraud stakeout to shake off the trauma from his last job involving a demonically possessed young boy. This gig inadvertently leads him to be hired by Dorothea Swann (Famke Janssen, X-Men, Goldeneye), the wife of famous illusionist Philip Swann (Kevin J. O’Connor, Deep Rising, The Mummy). She fears for her husband’s safety after his former associate Caspar Quaid (Joseph Lattimore, Devil in a Blue Dress) is murdered by a man named Butterfield (Barry Del Sherman, There Will Be Blood, American Beauty) and assumes Swann might be the next target.

You see, thirteen years ago in the Mojave Desert, Swann led some cult defectors (including Quaid) in an uprising against their former cult leader and powerful sorcerer William Nix (Daniel Von Bargen, Super Troopers, Seinfeld). Self-proclaimed as “The Puritan,” Nix planned on sacrificing a child to enhance his magic’s strength and cleanse the world in his vision, while providing power and knowledge to his devout followers. However, Swann and his crew were able to make the save in time, murdering and burying Nix to end his reign of terror before it was uncontrollable. Now it seems that Nix’s followers might have regrouped all these years later to take out Swann and the other defectors in an act of vengeance.

Things take a massive turn when D’Amour and Dorothea witness Swann die during one of his performances in what seems to be a stunt-gone-wrong. Both wanting to discover the truth as well as his new affection for Dorothea, D’Amour’s investigation leads to him learning of Swann’s past with Nix, as well as Butterfield and the other followers’ attempt to resurrect their leader and complete the plan he began all those years ago in the desert.

Lord of Illusions is perceived as a mixed bag as much now as it was back in the summer of 1995, when it underperformed at the box office, surpassing its $11 million budget by only $2 million. Critics were mixed on their feelings about it then and even today it scores 58% on Rotten Tomatoes, just on the doorstep of the 60% it needs to be considered “fresh.”

The film marks the last time Barker sat in the director’s chair for a major motion picture and is considered by many as his least appreciated film. Detractors previously cited that the first half of the film is great, while the second half became long-winded and tedious before the finale. And it seems they weren’t feeling Barker’s shift away from his usual unique horror elements, with Lord of Illusions leaning more into a mystery-thriller subgenre. Which is odd because this movie is actually based off his own short story The Last Illusion from the ’80s.

The movie is also littered with CGI effects; this was the mid-90s, after all, and the new technology was all the rage. While those effects were supposed to be a major highlight of the film, they look a bit awkward in a Lawnmower Man type of way and definitely have not held up over time. They also were not embraced by Clive Barker fans at the time, who appreciated the effects being mainly practical from his previous films, even though he still made sure to sprinkle enough practical gore where it is most impactful. Maybe this film’s biggest crime is that it wasn’t similar to Hellraiser or Nightbreed and simply caught fans off guard back in the 1990s.

But there is a lot to like about this film. For starters, the prologue in the desert really sets the stage for the rest of the proceedings and we are treated to the film taking place in several locations. And the story itself is actually engaging with some neat twists—the “illusions” are not limited to the literal battle of magic.

Additionally, the characters are interesting, and their portrayals are spot on. The extremely underrated Bakula was still trying to distance himself from being typecast as a Sam Beckett-esque character and really delivered as the lead. It almost seems like there was hope that Barker would be able to spin-off a potential franchise with D’Amour investigating more tales of the supernatural, but this film was not successful enough to warrant that. That is just speculation but appeared to be where things were headed if this were a hit. O’Connor can always be counted on to pull off bizarre characters believably, so that casting was spot on. Janssen used this role to get her career “Onatopp” of its game, starring in Goldeneye just a few months after Lord‘s release, and even reuniting with O’Connor in 1998’s cult classic Deep Rising before moving onto The Faculty, X-Men and many other roles on the rest of her impressive resume.

Thankfully, Umbrella has resurrected this flick and given it a new life for current and future generations to enjoy on Blu-ray, if they missed out on the Scream Factory release a decade ago or the recent one from 101 Films. How did they do with the transfer? Well, it’s Umbrella so they unsurprisingly knocked this one out of the park. The transfer is crisp with a 1080p format and 16:9 ratio, while the audio is 5.1 & 2.0 DTS. There are a great deal of archival featurettes, a trailer and commentary, as well as both the theatrical and director’s cuts of the film. The latter has about 11-12 minutes more footage added in, which Barker stands by as vastly changing the film for the better as he mentions in his commentary. Some cool scenes are thankfully added back in, but does it really change the overall film that much? You can decide for yourself.

Lord of Illusions is available from Umbrella Entertainment’s official website.

The post ‘Lord of Illusions’ 30 Years Later – Is Clive Barker’s Forgotten Movie Worth a Revisit? appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Survival odds become even more harrowing when a mysterious ship crashes mid-winter in period chiller The Damned from director Thordur Palsson. The first look trailer highlights just how cruel life can be in the 19th century.

Look for the psychological chiller to release in theaters on January 3, 2025.

The Damned follows “a 19th-century widow who is tasked with making an impossible choice when a ship sinks off the coast of her isolated fishing outpost during the middle of an especially cruel winter. With provisions running low, Eva and her close-knit community must choose between rescuing the shipwrecked crew and prioritizing their own survival. Facing the consequences of their decision and tormented by guilt, the inhabitants wrestle with a mounting sense of dread and begin to believe they are all being punished for their choices.”

Jamie Hannigan wrote the screenplay based on a story by Palsson.

The Damned boasts an impressive cast, too. Odessa Young (The Daughter, Assassination Nation), Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders), Siobhan Finneran (Downton Abbey), Rory McCann (Game of Thrones), Turlough Convery (Ready Player One), Lewis Gribben (Black Mirror), Francis Magee (Rogue One: A Start Wars Story), Mícheál Óg Lane (Calvary), Andrean Sigurgeirsson (The Darkness), Guillermo Uria (The Real Story Of…), and Arnar Máni Iansson Gray star.

The period horror movie made its debut earlier this year at the Tribeca Film Festival. I wrote in my capsule review that “The Damned plays like a well-crafted cautionary campfire tale. Palsson employs restraint with the folkloric elements, opting instead to lean into the ambiguities of superstition.”

Watch The Damned trailer below and wait for the film to arrive this winter.

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The mainstream film industry seems like it’s finally ready to accept that animation can also be used to tell adult-oriented stories, but there are still very few animators that specialize in creating hand-crafted frights. In fact, most of the popular spooky animated films out there were actually directed by the same legendary filmmaker – the insanely talented Henry Selick.

However, after making it big in the ’90s with The Nightmare Before Christmas (as well as the less successful but still entertaining James and the Giant Peach), Selick decided that it was time to try his luck with live-action storytelling, a decision that led to the infamous 2001 flop Monkeybone. However, despite the film’s reputation as a nearly incomprehensible mess, today I’d like to discuss how this oddball production might still appeal to modern-day horror fans.

Before Monkeybone there was Kaja Blackley’s Dark Town. An indie comic-book about a man who gets into a car accident and wakes up in a nightmarish land ruled by puppets, this critical darling miraculously reached Hollywood through a dedicated fan despite Kaja only ever releasing a single issue that ended on a cliffhanger. Once Selick received a copy of the comic through one of his producers, the director began securing funding for what he thought was going to be one of his most personal projects yet.

Unfortunately, the higher-ups were unsure if Selick’s talents would translate well to a live-action environment and began meddling in the production. That’s how a film that was originally meant to be an exceedingly dark and faithful recreation of the source material was slowly transformed into a crowd-pleasing blockbuster more akin to a poor man’s The Mask. The studio even wrenched control away from Selick during the editing phase, removing crucial pieces of worldbuilding and character development in order to streamline the experience.

In the “finished” film, which was released with little marketing buzz in February of 2001, Brendan Fraser stars as Stu, a weary cartoonist who finally achieved success by producing an animated series about his most personal creation, the mischievous Monkeybone (voiced by John Turturro). After getting into a car accident, Stu enters a coma and awakens in Down Town – a carnivalesque afterlife populated by nightmares, gods and figments of the waking world’s imagination. Once there, our hero reluctantly partners with Monkeybone himself and embarks on a twisted quest to return to his body before his estranged sister literally “pulls the plug.”

SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?

Even two decades later, Monkeybone is still remembered as one of Hollywood’s most infamous failures, with the film raking in less than $8 million on a $75 million budget and displeasing mainstream critics. Selick himself actually disowns the movie, claiming that the story that made it onto cinema screens back in 2001 wasn’t the story he initially set out to tell. He even says that the experience was so bad that it made him swear off live-action filmmaking for good.

And yet, the film that did make it into theaters was still a madly creative romp that juggled low-brow humor with the occasional flash of cinematic brilliance. If you look at each scene individually, this hybrid production features some legitimately impressive visuals, boasting chaotic character designs and effects (like strangely disproportionate monsters and even Giancarlo Esposito’s demonic take on Hypnos) that still hold up today.

In fact, the stylish production design only really falters during scenes taking place in the real world – which makes sense when you remember that these were likely much easier for producers to mess with. Thankfully, Brendan Fraser does his best to make even these moments entertaining (or at the very least interesting), especially when Monkeybone takes over Stu’s body and we get to see Fraser act like an uncomfortably horny version of George of the Jungle.

And speaking of Fraser, the film also somehow features one of the best comedic ensembles of the early 2000s, with Selick managing to recruit heavy hitters like Whoopie Goldberg, Thomas Haden Church, Chris Kattan, and even Bob Odenkirk (as well as the previously mentioned Esposito) in small yet memorable roles that add even more character to a film that’s already oozing with personality.

It may not make a ton of sense, but Monkeybone is far from a bad movie – it’s just an incomplete one.

AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?

Despite the dark source material that explores concepts like mortality and the eerie side of imagination, Monkeybone is still technically a family picture (though you’d be forgiven for forgetting that due to the bizarre amount of sexual innuendo on display here). However, it’s always difficult for genre veterans completely avoid horrific elements in non-horror projects, and that’s why I still recommend Selick’s film for horror fans with a taste for the strange.

After all, the main plot ultimately revolves around the god of dreams wanting to flood the world with nightmares, and there are more creepy monster designs here than in most popular creature features. There’s also no shortage of stories about young children who left theaters traumatized after the “silly monkey movie” turned out to be a dark comedy filled with demons, grim reapers and a slight amount of body horror.

Hell, one of the highlights of the flick is a chase scene involving doctors attempting to recover organs from a re-animated corpse! There’s also a memorable sequence where Stu runs into fellow haunted storytellers who were betrayed by their creations, with everyone from Edgar Allan Poe to Stephen King (who was played by a body-double due to scheduling issues) being kept in a metaphysical prison.

We may never know for sure if the original version of Monkeybone was truly a superior film (I’ll personally never give up hope on a possible director’s cut), but even if this chaotic quilt of a final cut is all we get, there’s enough creativity here to make it worth trudging through nonsensical editing and uneven humor in order to get to the good bits.

I mean, what other kid’s film claims that the dog from Cujo is currently residing in Stephen King’s body?

The post Returning to Down Town: Was Henry Selick’s Bizarre Dark Comedy ‘Monkeybone’ Really That Bad? appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Dating is hell in Lionsgate’s upcoming comedy thriller F Marry Kill, which sees a woman caught in an actual murder case when she dates three men at once. The brand new trailer introduces the potential suspect list in this genre-bender.

F Marry Kill releases in select theaters and on Digital on December 6, 2024.

“When true-crime junkie Eva Vaugh (Lucy Hale) is shoved into the dating app world by her besties on her 30th birthday, she suddenly finds herself at the center of a real-life murder case. As new details about the murders are revealed on her favorite podcast, she realizes that one of the three men she’s dating could be the infamous ‘Swipe Right Killer’ terrorizing the city! Now it’s up to Eva and her ride-or-die friends to figure out which date is a f***boy, a potential husband, or a killer in this whip-smart comedy-thriller.”

Laura Murphy (“Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens”) directs F Marry Kill, produced by BuzzFeed Studios.

Romance, humor, and suspense collide in this genre-bender. F Marry Kill also stars Samer Salem (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “NCIS”), Virginia Gardner (Project Almanac, Halloween), Jedidiah Goodacre, Brendan Morgan, Brooke Nevin, and Bethany Brown. 

Watch the new trailer below.

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt is set to star in Pendulum, a new genre pic directed by Black Swan scribe Mark Heyman and produced by Darren Aronofsky, Deadline reports today.

Pendulum will start principal photography in March 2025 and is described as a “terrifying new genre film.”

The film follows “young couple Patrick (Gordon-Levitt) and Abigail on a journey to a new-age retreat in New Mexico, drawn by the possibility of healing after a traumatic event. Patrick is willing to do anything to help his wife but becomes distrustful of the retreat’s enigmatic leader even as Abigail falls under her spell. As paranoia builds, the couple must determine if the group’s unconventional spiritual practices offer genuine healing – or mask a terrifying truth that threatens to consume them both.”

Aronofsky will produce through his Protozoa outfit. Also joining as producers are Jacob Jaffke (MaXXXine, Dream Scenario, Bodies Bodies Bodies) for Motel Mojave and Dave Caplan (Longlegs) for C2, which will also fully finance. The project will be introduced next week to buyers at the American Film Market. 

Most recently, Heyman wrote the final script for The Boogeyman, based on Stephen King’s short story. Outside of a small role in Halloween H20, Gordon-Levitt doesn’t venture into genre territory very often, so it’ll be interesting to see just how terrifying this new genre film will get.

Stay tuned for additional details on Pendulum as they arrive.

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