Horror author Clive Barker’s last (to date) directorial effort Lord of Illusions manages to cram almost everything I love into one two-hour package. It has Clive Barker (natch). It has gore. It has magicians. It has seedy detectives. It has pseudo-profundity. It has religious fanaticism. It has practical makeup effects courtesy of KNB. It has Famke Janssen (X-Men). Only if you threw in an appearance by Fast Times at Ridgemont High‘s Vincent Schiavelli would I love it more. Wait, he’s in it, too!

Scott Bakula (TV’s Quantum Leap) gets an all-too-rare leading role as Harry D’Amour, a P.I. who finds himself constantly drawn to supernatural phenomena. A case involving the apparent death of a Las Vegas illusionist (the invaluable Kevin J. O’Connor, Deep Rising) leads D’Amour to Nix, a cult leader better known as The Puritan (The Faculty‘s Daniel von Bargen, just wonderfully crazy).

Barker isn’t nearly enough of a stylist to pull off the vibe he’s going for (Raymond Chandler meets The Exorcist), and there are times when I find myself wishing someone like John Carpenter had been allowed a crack at the material. Working with his largest budget, Lord of Illusions is an accomplished movie, but it could use a healthy dose of the low-budget dementedness Barker brought to 1987’s Hellraiser.

But somehow, for me, it doesn’t matter that the technique is lumpy, or that a few of the special effects are iffy. Because there’s a private dick who describes an exorcism as “the usual,” and who greets the resurrection of a demon-man with a perfectly timed “Fuck.” There’s a decayed demigod who intones, “I was born to murder the world,” before slaying all of his followers. There’s an acolyte who waves knives and prances about menacingly in spandex pants. There’s a magic trick involving falling swords that goes horribly wrong. There’s a corpse-reanimation sequence that gave me nightmares. There’s a hole that appears to literally reach the center of the Earth.

And again, there’s Famke Janssen. —Corey Redekop

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In the despicable, dirty and even depressing The Killer Snakes (that’s all the recommendation you need, right?), the saddest sad-sack character I may have ever seen in movie history works one dead-end job after another and sleeps in a shack with pornographic pictures taped to the ceiling over his bed.

He gets bullied a lot by just about everyone with whom he comes into contact — skinny, street-corner whores included. The guy is in such dire need of a haircut and a flea dip that I could barely stand to watch him. I’m still unsure as to whether his character is supposed to have a mild mental handicap or if the movie is just that poorly dubbed.

After a hard day of being fired from the place where they serve the innards of snakes’ gall bladders and being caught masturbating by the woman he loves from afar, this miserable little man befriends an injured cobra in his shack. The cobra is sad because his gall bladder has been taken from him without his consent. So our hero zero sews him up and nurses him back to health, affording the same treatment to all the serpent’s equally scaly pals, also robbed of this organ.

Somewhere along the way, he trains the snakes to attack and kill, although we never see this most difficult of training processes. It’s time for revenge. First he goes to the whorehouse where earlier he was the recipient of much kicking and abuse. He does his business with the hooker most resembling circus clown Emmett Kelly (in a scene so entirely disgusting you’ll want to shower) and then lets the cobras go full-fang at her bodyguards, while she faints. He takes the unconscious whore home, ties her up and then lets the slithering creatures have sloppy seconds.

Starring Kurt Lang (Purple Storm), Maggie Lee (Kung Fu: The Punch of Death) and “1001 killer snakes” (per its poster), the Shaw Brothers production is one of the more perverted and sick-minded exploitation offerings I’ve seen. Its X rating is well-deserved. —Rod Lott

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