The Serpent & the Rainbow is a horror movie inspired by the book of the same name, starring Bill Pullman, Cathy Tyson, Conrad Roberts, Zakes Mokae, Paul Winfield, Brent Jennings, and a very young Paul Guilfoyle, and directed by Wes Craven.
Dennis Alan (Pullman) is an anthropologist who roams the world looking for new and exciting plants that could be turned into best-selling drugs (which would probably make him the villain in a contemporary movie, but this is the 80s). He winds up first in South America where he gets dosed with a hallucinogen and discovers that his spirit animal is a jaguar, which is pretty cool, and then winds up going to Haiti during the Duvalier regime (unwise) to learn about a "zombie powder". His source here is that he's got a death certificate for a fellow named Christophe (Roberts), and then a recent photo of him. Seems a little flimsy to me, but whatever, off he goes!
He winds up meeting with a psychiatrist named Marielle (Tyson) who treated Christophe, and together they go looking for what really happened. This search takes them to graveyards, torture, run-ins with the evil head of the secret police (Mokae), a local hougan (Winfield), and a guy named Mozart (Jennings) who can actually make the zombie powder. Marielle and Dennis wind up together, Dennis is framed for murder and kicked out of Haiti, but then comes back and is almost immediately poisoned with the powder. His jaguar comes through in the clutch, though.
My rather spotty summary aside, it's a good horror movie. The science is junk, obviously (tetrodoxin is now and was then pretty well understood), but the movie does a good job of capturing the feel of a nation on the brink of revolution (hahahahasob). Likewise, while Pullman isn't the first name I'd think of to headline a horror movie, he pulls it off nicely and comes off as vulnerable and out of his depth, though still competent in his field.
The real star of the movie is Zakes Mokae as Peytraud, though. The first scene he's in, while Marielle is being ridden by Erzulie (boy, that's a sentence that changes if you don't know the context), just has him sitting at a table and tapping a glass with a fork, but he manages to exude so much casual menace that you immediately know he's dangerous. Likewise, Craven spends enough time building him up as a threat and showing that Alan is (rightly) afraid of him that when the tables finally turn it means something.
The end fight where everything gets all magic-y is perhaps a little clumsy, but I'm happy that they didn't fridge Marielle, and I think it's cool that Peytraud's downfall coincides with Duvalier's fleeing Haiti and the subsequent revolution. I also think, however, that this movie could stand a remake with Jordan Peele's involvement somewhere.
My Grade: B+
Rewatch Value: Medium
Next up: Below
No comments:
Post a Comment