Sometimes, time casts the most bewitching spell of all, casually erasing movies that maybe didn’t get the fairest shake of the whip when they were first released. A good example of this is Warlock, a fantasy/horror/comedy fusion from 1989 that really doesn’t get the props it truly deserves – especially considering that it was conjured up to us by the likes of Steve (House, Lake Placid) Miner and the pen of David (Pitch Black) Twohy and features noticable thespian Julian Sands and Richard E. Grant ruthlessly hamming it up like their lives depended on it.
Horror comedies in general are a curious breed and notoriously difficult to pull off – for every Re-Animator and An American Werewolf In London that nails that delicate balance between grue and giggles, there are countless attempts that are either not scary, or worse yet, about as funny as having your appendix removed by a cheese grater.
And yet, with a curiously unique approach to witches and spells, Warlock manages to magic up something rather special.
Back in Boston, Massachusetts in the year 1691, a fearsome, Satan-loving Warlock has managed to be brought to justice by shaggy witch hunter Giles Redferne and is awaiting a fittingly complicated execution that with see him hung and burnt over a basket full of cats (damn, old-timey religious shit was weird). However, before the incredibly smug Warlock can meet his fate, Satan stages something of a original jail break by creating a vortex in time and whisking his long-tailed agent forward in time to the 1980s presumably because blowing out a wall and waiting in a getaway car is way too gauche for the Prince of Darkness.
Arriving in the decade of big hair and bigger shoulder pads, the Warlock wastes no time fucking up the life of vapid valley girl waitress, Kassandra as he murders her housemate and inflicts a spell on her that causes her to age twenty years every day. Worse yet, the reason Satan has dumped the Warlock in the present is because he wants his disciple to locate the scattered pages of the Devil’s bible, The Grand Grimoire and once brought together and read from, it could potentially cause the unmaking of creation.
However, it’s revealed that the ever determined Redferne has managed to hitch a ride with his enemy to the future and with a rapidly aging Kassandra in tow, the mismatched pair set out to stop him once and for all.
They’re going to have their work cut out for them because not only is the Warlock expanding his infernal bag of tricks, but the selfish Kassandra is only really interested in restoring her stolen youth with the fate of all existence coming in a distant second. Will this and Redferne’s understandable culture shock impede their efforts to bring the Warlock down?
To break it down as simply as possible, Warlock is pretty much a more cheerful reshuffling of James Cameron’s Terminator if you swapped out Schwarzenegger’s hulking T-101 with a never more suave Julian Sands, Michael Biehn’s Kyle Reese with an animal fur laden Richard E. Grant and Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor with Flashdance’s Lori Singer – but despite the similarities, the movie at no point feels like some sort of cheap rip off. One of the main factors of this is Twohy’s endlessly inventive script that not only gives all the culture shock, fish out of water stuff a nice fresh spin, but he gets impressive mileage out of delving into all the macabre practices the Warlock has to go through to in order to perform his more funkier powers, or the rituals his nemesis resports to in order to thwart him. Need to find a way to locate the Grand Grimoire? Simple, merely remove the eyes of a possessed medium that will glance in the direction you need to go. Need to whip up the ability to fly? No sweat, all our sneering antagonist has to do is eat the fat of an unbaptised child and off he flies – although the effects to pull this off are noticably dated. Similarly, Twohy also creates fascinating ways to hurt the villainous magical bastard too, enlisting such things as salt, weather vanes and even enchanted nails as weapons against the spell casting bastard.
Matching the script’s level of invention is Miner’s ability to keep things oddly light while frequently dropping moments of straight horror with an admirable amount of restraint. It takes balls to drop jokes about Grant freaking out about modern vehicles and Singer’s stream of sarcastic comments and then segue into the (off screen) murder and partial consumption of a child, or the graphic murder of Kassandra’s house mate who has the tongue bitten clean out of his mouth and spat into a sizzling frying pan. However, after launching his career with two Friday The 13th sequels on the bounce and following them up with the gloriously campy ghost story, House (we won’t mention Soul Man), the director has a solid grasp on the material.
Of course, it helps that you have two actors like Sands and Grant on hand who are utterly game to hurl themselves into the swirling void that is Warlock. Sands excels at playing the preening villain, infusing his cold-blooded, magical motherfucker with a wonderfully hissable type of dead-eyed cruelty you usually associate with someone who puts animals down for fun. Meanwhile, Richard E. Grant seems to relish playing a swashbuckling hero and even manages to hold a passable Scottish accent for the duration while brawling with his foe. However, a sizable weak link makes itself apparent in the shape of the fact that Lori Singer seems hopelessly miscast. Her character’s gallows humor seems tailor made for the sort of plucky heroines Sandra Bullock played early in her career, but Singer’s delivery is just too heavy handed and its offset even further by the fact that she plays her aging character as 60 when she’s supposed to be 40 and 80 when she’s supposed to be 60. I don’t know, maybe 60 year olds were noticably frailer in the 1980s, or maybe no one involved in the production had ever met a 60 year-old in person before, but unfortunately Singer is the only bum note in a near flawless company.
And yet no one ever brings up Warlock despite the fact it even got a couple of sequels (only one of which featured Sands) and stands as the one of the best, lost jewels of the 80s. Yes, the effects are dated – the flying effects may not be Superman IV bad, but they certainly need to watched with forgiving eye – but the wonderfully off-beat tone and the delicious mix of goofy cheese and suprising viciousness proves to be something of a wicked treat. Hell, we even get a Jerry Goldsmith score to boot!
One day, a sizable reassessment will hopefully be on the cards, but until then I’ll always fight in the corner of this mean little son of a witch.
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