Directors: Panos Cosmatos, Casper Kelly
Writers: Panos Cosmatos, Aaron Stewart-Ahn
Stars: Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache
Run Time: 2 Hours, 1 Minute
Link: https://amzn.to/3gh8Ndq
Synopsis
We start in the Shadow Mountains, in 1983, where Red Miller is a lumberjack. He goes home to his wife, and they talk about which planet is their favorite, which then turns into a comic book discussion about Galactus. They sleep outside in a tent, when she wakes up in the morning, Mandy hears strange animal calls and finds a dead animal. An unclear amount of what I just said was actually Red’s bad dream.
Mandy also has a dream, where a group of people in a car are coming towards her; they are Jeremiah and the Children of the New Dawn. On the other hand, the real-life Jeremiah can also sense her. He needs her. He’s a cult leader, and she has what he wants. He orders one of his men to bring Mandy to him. They go out in the woods and blow a magic horn, which summons a demonic biker gang.
These cenobite-looking demons enter Red and Mandy’s home and knock Red out. In the morning, Mandy wakes up to find herself captured and tied to a chair, with Red tied to a tree outside. The cultists give her some kind of eyedrops and sting her with a huge bee. She’s all drugged up. Jeremiah plays an old record; he’s a failed musician. He gives a long speech which makes no sense because everyone is high on drugs. Mandy just laughs at him, enraging Jeremiah.
Red wakes up, also a prisoner of the cult, and still tied up. Jeremiah stabs him in the side with a huge dagger. They set Mandy on fire in front of him and watch her burn to a fine powder, which eventually blows away. The cultists leave, and then Red finally manages to pull his hands free of the barbed wire that was tying them. He goes inside, watches a commercial for “Cheddar Goblin,” and then has a fully-animated dream. Then he screams, drinks, and cries for five minutes or so.
The next morning, he gets his crossbow, forges a new battleaxe, and now it’s revenge time. He quickly gets injured and knocked out, and we see that Red still has dreams in cartoon-o-vision. When he wakes up, he’s literally nailed to the floor by one of the cenobytes. Red’s not the wimp he was fifteen minutes ago, because now he’s John Wick; he manages to beat the thing’s brains in with a pipe and escape. And that covers the next fifteen minutes: John Wick vs Hellraiser.
Then it’s time to go after the cultists. You would expect them to be easier than the monsters. They are, but they’re also way more fun to kill.
Commentary
The entire film goes like this: Cultists kill a guy’s wife, and the guy gets revenge. It’s hard to make such a simple plot interesting, but they really tried here. The first half is still pretty dull, but it more than makes up for it in the second half.
It’s weird from the very beginning. The lighting is mysterious and unearthly in every scene, but it is very interesting just to look at. Some characters just morph into other characters in mid-sentence, voices and all, which is pretty cool. It’s also got some of the juiciest gore scenes I’ve seen this year, and it all looks really good.
There are huge segments of the film that make no logical sense at all, but at least it’s fun to watch.