Despite creating Freddy Krueger – undoubtedly the horror icon of the decade – Wes Craven seemed to find the 80s quite hard going. Even though he’d put himself firmly on the horror map during the 70s by battering audiences with the sheer brutality of both The Last House On The Left and The Hills Have Eyes, films such as Swamp Thing, The Hill Have Eyes Part 2 and a bunch of TV movies hadn’t really seen the director reaching the lofty potential of his earlier works. Similarly, his post Nightmare On Elm Street output had paled in comparison to his Jungian horror opus, with such works as Deadly Friend being tampered with by interfering studios – simply put, Craben needed to do something different enough to keep himself interested, but something that also benefited from his knack of creating nightmare imagery.
Cue The Serpent And The Rainbow, a movie based of the seemingly non-fiction account of ethnobotanist Wade Davis’ first hand experiences of voodoo practices that seemingly would be the perfect fit Craven was looking for.
Now go do the voodoo, that you do, so well.
The year is 1985 and while Harvard anthropologist Dennis Alan rummages around the Amazon rainforest, studying rare herbs and medicines and getting blasted off his tits on thanks to a local shaman, he gets the sense of overwhelming evil stalking him somehow. This blood chilling premonition soon comes true when he’s approached back in Boston by a pharmaceutical company that has its eye on a drug used in Hatian voodoo practices that could be used to save hundreds of thousands of lives if used for medicinal purposes.
The proof they have is the account of the death of a man named Christophe who was buried only to be spotted (sort of) alive and (kind of) well a short while later and if Dennis can locate this “zombie”, it’ll no doubt put him on the right track. However, after arriving in Haiti, Allen soon find that the prickly political climate isn’t the only dangerous feeling that hangs in the air as Dr. Marielle Duchamp walks him through the treacherous lay of the land.
While there are those who practice in the good aspects of voodoo such as local houngan, Lucien Celine, there are others who blatant use it for their own, evil ends and after Captain Dargent Peytraud, the commander of the region’s secret police and a zombie making, soul stealing bokor, learns of Dennis’ mission, he soon proves to be the evil force that Allen’s Amazonian hallucination warned him about.
With the country on the edge of revolution and Peytraud’s efforts to thwart him getting ever more brutal, can Dennis get out of Haiti with the drug in his possession and his soul intact?
While I have to say that The Serpent And The Rainbow isn’t exactly my favorite 80s, non-Elm Street offering from Craven (that’s an honor reserved for the gloriously unhinged Shocker), I will also freely admit it’s full head and shoulders above the director’s other fare from the decade and for the most part it’s a mix of a bold new direction for the master of horror that also throws in Wes’ signature use of nightmarish imagery. While the blend isn’t as smooth as you’d might expect, the fact Craven has moved on from creating films around news reports and random clippings to attempting to adapt a work of non-fiction is fairly ballsy for a year that saw an unfettered amount of horror sequels flooding the cinemas.
Now obviously, this is a very loose adaptation that takes Wade’s basic concept of voodoo potions and brutal politics and adds a selection of memorable horror set pieces that usually prove to be better than the film itself. While there’s a bunch of dream sequences that plays nicely with voodoo iconography that sees corpse brides disgorging pythons from elongated mouths and its hero being dragged into a hole by dozens of grasping hands, it’s a pair of scenes that zero in on reality that ironically provide the more genuine horrors. The first sees an impressively game Bill Pullman falling foul of the skewed laws created by Zakes Mokae’s memorable tyrant, Peytraud and being tortured for his involvement. However, Craven takes matters a little further than just your standard beatings and whippings that sees Dennis enduring the wince inducing act of having a nail hammered through his scrotum while his tormentor memorably leers “I wanna hear you scream.”. However, later on things get even worse when Pullman gets more of that wonder voodoo drug than he’d hoped for and slips into a death-like state that sees him buried alive and Craven’s treatment of the actor ranks an impressively solid 8.5 on the Sam Raimi/Bruce Campbell actor abuse scale.
However, with a ninety minute run time, Craven is forced to gloss over a lot of the turbulent political parts of the plot and instead focuses more on the quicker, easier trope of having a white dude wander into a non-white situation and eventually save the day. As a result, The Serpent And The Rainbow dedicates itself mostly to trippy visuals and disposable scares when you feel it could have been much, much more – think The Last King Of Scotland meets Hereditary, or something. However, once again, Vraven seems slightly limited by his fame as even if hed managed to wring every last drop of intrigue out of the scenario, his fans would have no doubt complained that he’d taken his eye off the horror flavoured ball.
If it feels I’m being unnecessarily harsh on The Serpent And The Rainbow, it’s only because I’m big believer of what Craven could accomplish when in the midst of a perfect storm, but that’s not to say he doesn’t conjure up a stirring movie nonetheless.
While Bill Pullman may seem like a strange choice for a lead thanks to his presidential turn in Independence Day, he’s also a guy who has headlined David Lynch’s Lost Highway and his rational, all-American nature fit well here. Elsewhere, Cathy Tyson is reduced to a damsel in distress and Paul Winfield is criminally underused, but Zakes Moake makes up for these errors by being a great villain and even though Brad Fiedel’s score is very “Terminator meets Haiti”, it keeps things moving.
The problems with The Serpent And The Rainbow become fairly apparent with the very Hollywood climax where a mental battle of Willis between good and evil is shown as a WWE style brawl as Dennis and Peytraud suddenly start thrown hands and hurling each other through the air like Brock Lesnar. It’s a fun way to conventionally end an American horror film in 1988, but one wonders what Craven could have done if given the chance to push some boundaries and defy conventions.
As Voodoo movies go, Craven manages to give a more balanced view than many of his peers managed (Child’s Play’s use of the craft, anyone?), but you can’t help feel he’s being constrained by conventions here as much as a man trapped in a sealed coffin.
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