Lord of Illusions is a hard film for me to review. It’s one of those films that I love even though I know in my heart that it’s a cinematic failure. That’s often the case with the film translations of Clive Barker work. Barker himself directed this (as he did with Hellraiser and Nightbreed), and it’s full of great ideas that are pretty poorly implemented.
I have to admit that I’ve always loved when films have tried to mix the hard-boiled detective pulp genre with horror. It’s not as if there are tons of examples of this combination around (the entirely awesome Cast A Deadly Spell and the entirely shitty Rough Magic are the only ones that really spring to mind), so I tend to latch onto the few I know. Harry D’Amour (Scott Bakula) is a down on his luck detective always in search of the next job. Unfortunately Harry also has a predilection of somehow getting involved with the darker aspects of the world and the occult. Harry agrees to take a routine job in Los Angeles as a sort of vacation from his troubles in the Big Apple. His stay in LA is anything but routine. He quickly gets drawn into a deadly case involving the famous illusionist (ala David Copperfield and David Blaine) Philip Swann (the always awesome Kevin J. O’Connor) and his wife Dorothea (the always smokin’ hot Famke Janssen). It seems that Swann was once the protégé of the evil sorcerer Nix. For some reason, Swann and some friends didn’t really agree with Nix and his cult when they decided it was time to “murder the world,” so they killed Nix, bound him in some magical face-clamp, and buried him out in the desert. Now Nix is coming back, and Swann’s friends are dying left and right. What do you do when a really pissed off dead sorcerer comes back to finish his interrupted plans to destroy the world… apparently you hire the guy from Quantum Leap to save you.
The movie has a great atmosphere and some creepy visuals to boot. Barker has always excelled at bringing a darker tone to horror than most other writers. He tends to create a strange sexual sadomasochistic tone to most of his work that’s outright creepy. Lord of Illusions is no different. Nix’s main henchman, Butterfield, is a pretty perverse character that somehow reminds me of a demented, evil version of the fat interior decorator from Beetlejuice. On the down side, Barker has never been a very accomplished director. The pacing is all wrong, and the material isn’t always handled correctly. It seems that Barker went at this story half-assed and didn’t deliver the full goods amid worries about how commercial the film should be. I also have to say that while I generally like Scott Bakula… he just doesn’t fit the tone of the story. He’s more suited to lighter drama and comedy. It doesn’t help that D’Amour is the lead character, yet he’s also the least fleshed out. Anyways, this was fun for what it is. It’s disappointing that the premise isn’t fully explored, but on the whole it’s a somewhat likeable film. It’s definitely a hard film for me to look objectively at, so this is a pretty shitty review.
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