Back in 1989 we got Warlock, a surprisingly over-achieving, time travelling horror/comedy that saw Julian Sands and Richard E. Grant do battle in a centuries spanning escapade that hit all the necessary beats to make a rollockingly fun adventure. Of course, devoting only a single film to Julian Sands’ deliciously evil and impressively bitchy Warlock would be a crime against humanity in of itself (especially in the 90s), so a few years later we got a follow up.
Director Steve Miner was out, as was scripter David Twohy and co-star Richard E. Grant – but joining Sands to helm his second, unholy outing was Anthony Hickox, the man who had given us the peppy, hyperactive horror flicks Waxwork and Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth. The result may have been as brain dead as the moldering corpse of one of the debonair villain’s clueless victims. However, the late Hickox was never one for overly thoughtful ventures and instead, Warlock: The Armageddon delivers gloopy carnage and kick-ass deaths in a way only the early 90s could.
After a prologue that essentially sets up an entirely new backstory, the malevolent Warlock is now Satan’s official son who is reborn every few millennia during an eclipse in order to bust his demonic dad from the fiery lock up we commonly refer to as Hell and the quickest way to defeat him is simply for a band of warrior druids to prevent his birth before it happens. Of course due to a band of Christians sticking their noses in during the last attempt all those years ago, the runes needed to thwart the birth are scattered all across America and so the fiendishly suave emissary of evil is born one again (all full sized) from the womb of an unsuspecting woman in New York.
Fashioning a map out of the woman’s back skin (as you do), the Warlock goes on a coast to coast road trip in order to collect the remaining runes and complete his task, but meanwhile, in California, the last living descendants of the druids realise that they have to prepare their unwitting children for battle. However, said children – the somewhat drippy Travis and Samantha – are locked in a Romeo and Juliet style romance and have no clue of their hugely important destiny.
While they undergo vigorous training that involves everything from making a baseball whizz around like a Snitch from Quiddich to taking a shotgun round in the chest, the Warlock gets ever closer, leaving a trail of fantastical murders in his wake as he collects all the runes he needs to end the world.
Can this vicious, magical motherfucker be stopped by a couple of love sick teens, or will he spring his father from his hellfire pokey as doom us all to utter destruction? Honestly, my money’s on the Warlock at this point…
There’s a particular brand of horror film that emerged in the early 90s that really reveled in carrying on with that splattery aesthetic that was forged in the rubber and corn syrup of the 80s, but turbo charged the pace to the point that it all played like a comic book. The prime provider of these kinds of gore-soaked experiences was usually Brian Yunza who gave us the likes of Bride Of Re-Animator, Return Of The Living Dead III, Ticks and Necronomicon, but in the rare times when he wasn’t around, Anthony Hickox would dutifully step in to hurl as much viscera around as the budget would allow.
However, before I spend the rest of the review gushing over the copious gore effects (and believe me, I can’t wait), I suppose I’d better ground the review by going over the film’s more creakier points of which there are quite a lot. For a start, for whatever reason, Warlock: The Armageddon may be one of the most carelessly looped movies I’ve seen that isn’t a 70s Japanese monster movie and while it wouldn’t be that much of an issue generally speaking, it seems that the entirety of the film’s dialogue was delivered from a recording booth months after the fact. As a result, all the performances are made about as subtle as a pantomime performed by asylum inmates while all whacked out on tranquilizers. There’s not one, single, grounded line reading here and while Sands’ villain weirdly benefits by his killer one liners sounding super-camp, any exposition and serious character work is reduced to mush and Chris Young and Paula Marshall’s lead suffers greatly by being super punchable.
Another problem that can’t be ignored is the strange issue that Hickox is far too an inventive and creative director for his own good sometimes and even though the onslaught of extravagant tracking shot, zooms, swoops and split- diopter filters the director uses with reckless abandon may be genuinely cool, it also fiercely keeps you from treating anything that’s occuring with any degree of seriousness whatsoever.
However, who the fuck needs seriousness when the film delivers such carnage at such an unregulated rate and right from the moment that a woman suddenly sees her belly grow as her womb disgorges a cancerous birthing sac that births a slimy, adult Sands (who immediately kills a puppy), the film slams the peddle to the metal and doesn’t let up until the end credits roll. In fact, it would be pretty fair to point out that Warlock: The Armageddon is almost a perfect blueprint for the likes of the Wishmaster franchise that also saw a suited, inhuman creature loaded up with magical powers and a mile-long mean streak unleash surreal hell on a horrified supporting cast. Such delights include a poor soul who is twisted and broken into a living work of whimpering art, another who is trapped inside a mirror-based torture dimension and a fashion designer who discovers a whole new world of pain when the Warlock suggests that they go flying together and each death is diverse, cool and, most importantly, entertaining as hell. But wait, that’s not all – because beyond the Nightmare On Elm Street style kill sequences, the movie throws a bunch of other funky stuff at us as well. Be it pulsating skin maps that need recharging with the blood of a freshly removed scalp or the Warlock shooting two gun wielding adversaries with his finger guns that not only fire actual bullets, but they also smoke afterwards so Sands can blow on them like a cowboy.
Some may be turned of by the admittedly shitty CGI (primitive even by 1993 standards) or the fact that the overblown, Omen-style soundtrack eliminates any lingering subtlety that Hickox somehow has managed to miss, but then if you’ve turned up to the Warlock party looking for any form of nuance whatsoever, I have to question what the hell you were expecting of a Warlock movie to begin with.
Sadly, despite looking like he’s having a blast while being soacked in gore (didn’t get much of that on the set of Room With A View, I’d wager) Julian Sands stepped down from the role when a third film rolled around in favour of rent-a-baddie Bruce Payne, but thankfully he gets to leave his mark so hard with his clipped, leering delivery, his enchantment lingered long after he left.
Hickox has conjured up the very definition of flawed, but fun.
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