Strong and Moving!

So much average

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

In the Mojave Desert, practitioner of the dark arts Nix (Daniel von Bargen) leads a cult and has kidnapped a girl named Dorothea. His apprentice Swann (Kevin J. O'Connor) leads former cult members to rescue the girl. Nix can't be killed but Swann binds him and buries him. Thirteen years later, Harry D'Amour (Scott Bakula) is a NY private eye specializing in the occult. He travels to L.A. on a case where he stumbles onto Swann, and his now wife Dorothea (Famke Janssen) as followers of Nix try to find the burial site and free Nix.This is a fine Clive Barker story. It has a compelling plot. Scott Bakula is good as the lead. The major drawback is the weak special effects and some weak directing from Barker. The CGI is pretty bad and some get really cheesy. The Nix apparition looks horrible. The final battle has some good parts and some bad parts. The makeup is mostly good. I like the henchman character Butterfield but I wish that he be played by the same actor in both time frame. I don't understand why there are two actors playing that character.

Long story: Years ago, mid-Nineties, I saw bits of a movie at a friend's house after opting not to videotape it back home. It turned out to be better than I expected, and now, years later, I'm trying to find it. Problem is, I don't know the name of the movie. Or the actors.So why bother the fans of LORD OF ILLUSIONS? It clearly isn't this movie as I downloaded the trailer last night. But what I do remember of the target I'm searching for is (1) character name Swann (2) bad guy had a mandrill in a cage, a young girl in a cage, he intimated that he was going to put the girl in the cage with this horny creature (3) mind-bending powers of bad guy...You're all screaming this is LORD OF ILLUSIONS. I insist that it is not. I saw your movie trailer last night, and Scott Bakula doesn't ring a bell, and I'm RavenGlamDVDCollector, Famke GOLDENEYE Janssen would have rung a bell.The movie I saw was on South African pay-channel M-Net during the mid-Nineties, which places it in the same era as your movie. MAJOR POINT HERE: TV Trope & Idioms site refers to the movie's maniac monkey as a mandrill. From the flash of it seen in the downloaded trailer, THAT IS NOT A MANDRILL. Movie I'm talking about featured a big, hulking male mandrill with that 'war-painted horrible face', not the little fun thing from FRIENDS and CALIFORNICATION gone momentarily berserk.Identifying it hinges on the mentioned key scene: Does your LORD OF ILLUSIONS feature a despicable guy threatening to put a captive girl in a cage with an adult male mandrill (with for all practical purposes is a rainbow-faced baboon, very intimidating)And if I have just been wasting your time, kindly note that SOMEWHERE OUT THERE IS A MOVIE VERY SIMILAR IN KEY STRUCTURE, perhaps inspired by Clive Barker's work. Or am I 'barking' up the wrong tree? RavenGlamDVDCollector@gmail.com eagerly awaits your response. Please enlighten me with any comments and clues.

This films starts out with a group of people infiltrating a cult leaders place and placing a mask on said cult leader. Very painful process and you may wonder why they felt the need to do this, it is because this man has powers and they are very deadly. Flash years later and the man who was pretty much in charge of stopping the cult leader and was once under his tutelage is now an illusionist. Well one of his tricks goes array and his wife knows that something is not quite right so she hires an investigator to find out what is going on. Enter Harry D'mour, an investigator played by Scott Bakula who I always have to wonder how did this guy not get more roles in more mainstream fare as he is a rather good actor. Well the cult leaders former cult is trying to revive him and this is something that must be stopped, because this guy is like evil. You will get to find out how evil during a scene where he gives the gift of rain to his followers that is really quite freaky. Had some good qualities in this one, but so much more could of been done. The kills though are good, the story is pretty good too, I just find the ending a bit underdone, I was expecting more. However, all in all a rather good offering from writer Clive Barker.

What the &@#% is this @$&%!?!? First off, I have always loved Clive Barker films more perhaps than any other author in the genre because the books are primarily kept in line with the stories and maintain a strong visual representation to his original vision. Hellraiser, Nightbreed, Dread, and Books of Blood all while suffering changes, maintained the vision.This movie... this movie does not in any shape of the imagination. The first problem I have is with the way characters are portrayed. Butterfield is transformed form a high powered attorney to a homosexual sadomasochist looking thing, Swann is portrayed as this young 90s hipster looking thing rather than a man that that woman he's seducing at the beginning of the novella comments that she prefers men 20 years younger than, Dorotheia is a child who was saved from cult activities rather than a prostitute, and there are just so many things wrong with Valentine (like the lack of him being a demon) that I don't want to start.Then we have the problem with the movie itself. The idea of "cremate Swann before the Gulfs can tear his soul apart" story of the novella was very good and very compelling. It was a fascinating read that I didn't want to let go of until it done. This travesty with Nix, and cults, and scenes taken from "Sins of the Father" was a jumbled mess that stomped all over the plot points which made the original story so good.My belief? Read the novella and watch this merely as a companion piece. Because quite honestly it comes down to this: Stephen King had the ABC miniseries It that debased the work it came from... well Clive Barker has this movie to his credit.