d./w./p. Richard Driscoll; cast: ‘Steven Craine’, Bai Ling,
Michael Madsen, Tom Sizemore, Lysette Anthony, Sylvester McCoy
Unsure of its own title, this latest Driscoll film is (mostly)
the one he shot in 2006 as The Raven Part 2 which he has been trying to edit
together ever since. Over the years variously aka The Devil’s Disciple,
Back2Hell, When the Devil Rides Out and even Blade Hunter, it’s a prequel to EvilCalls, in which author George Carney comes up with the main story of that film.
Hence stock footage of Eileen Daly (credited top and tail), Jason Donovan (in
end credits only) and Norman Wisdom (uncredited). The Ask, who assures me he got
paid, actually pops up in two very brief new scenes as Carney’s cuckolding
bother.
Carney is a pulp writer whose New York editor Martha
(Anthony) has bought a collection of original HP Lovecraft manuscripts which
includes the ‘Necromonicon’ (sic) which is, of course, actually the secret
diary of Aleister Crowley aged 36½. Martha sends Carney to New Orleans to get
the diary authenticated by bisexual femme fatale tattooist Zilia (Ling, who
flashes her tiny tits at the drop of a hat). This will somehow enable him to
adapt it into a graphic novel because that’s what sells (as evidenced by a news
report on a superhero named the Praying Mantis). It all turns out to be a plot
to ritually sacrifice Carney and thereby resurrect the Great Beast himself.
Everybody is involved in this conspiracy, of course, including
auctioneer Dudley Sutton (died 2018), university academic Vass Anderson (died
2015), vintage bookseller Sylvester McCoy, Madsen and Sizemore (who are both
some sort of underworld contacts, I think), Zilia, Martha, The Ask and an unnamed
comic book artist who seems to be Carney’s flatmate (the credits don’t identify
individual characters, but this doesn’t seem to be any of the credited male
cast). RADA graduate Clive Shilson (died 2012) appears momentarily as a strip
club patron. The original 2006 shoot definitely included Kenny Baker (died
2016) and allegedly included Tom Savini, but neither is evident here.
Despite the rambling, nonsensical, contradictory plot – and the
fact that almost all the American characters have British accents – this is
actually one of The Drisc’s more coherent narratives; certainly much more so
than the random WTF-ery of Assassin’s Revenge. The ending is sudden and
inexplicable but there is a plot of sorts. Nominally it is “based on the MR
James novel Casting the Runes” (which isn’t a novel…) and there are a couple of
references to a slip of paper with symbols on it which Carney finds inside the
diary, but that is swiftly forgotten. Nevertheless, the additional footage shot
in Cornwall in 2017, including a scene in the Boscastle Witchcraft Museum, was
filmed under the title Curse of the Demon.
This has finally seen the light of day thanks to American executive
producers Maria Norman and Galen Walker of B-movie/space documentary
distributor Monarch Films. A trailer was released in October 2018 and it
finally turned up on both British and American Amazon Prime this month.
All the above notwithstanding, the film’s highlights include
Sutton’s HP Lovecraft infodump speech, partly cut and pasted from a horror wiki,
which specifies his dates of birth and death and then adds a new line that gets
his age-at-death wrong; a time-lapse shot of the Moon crossing the New Orleans
sky with a real-time rain effect over it; and the traditional misspellings
which include actress Gabz Barker (on the front desk of the museum) as ‘Gabz
Baker’ and British horror regular art director Melanie Light (here an ‘Art Dept
Assistant’) as ‘Melaine Light’. Some things never change.
