THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW (1988) Ow ow ow ow OW OW OW dammit A lot of horror fans really hate Wes Craven's movies - exacerbated by the too-big success of Scream and its sequels, his long-held style of escapist horror is often seen as exactly what's wrong with movies these days. If the first generation of slasher flicks all wanted to be Friday the 13th, the second one wanted to be Scream, with or without the jokes. The Serpent And The Rainbow is a bit of a blip in his film history; it's gritter, uglier, and for most of its length more serious about its subject matter. Voodoo has gotten a bad rap from the movies, because movies all focus on its spooky side - okay, every side is its spooky side. Voodoo is hardly alone in that regard. But at least this movie takes it seriously - again, for most of its length. Based (loosely, I assume!) on a true story, this stars Bill Pullman as a scientist investigating a mysterious zombification drug in Haiti. When Fulci famously said that zombies don't belong to George Romero but to Haiti, he should've been more specific - Haitian-style zombies don't feast on the flesh of the living or keep lurching on through any injury short of a bullet in the head. The zombies in this movie are closer to the Haitian concept - these zombies are people with their metabolism lowered to undetectable levels, and later when the drug wears off, reawaken but appear somewhat brain damaged, making it all the easier to convince them their souls have been stolen. Pullman gets a fair bit of bored-sounding, Blade Runner-ish narration, and it's as unnecessary here as it was in that movie. Lots of hallucinations and drug-induced visions follow, ranging from the fanciful (the vision where Bill gets sucked into the ground is great until it cheeses out by showing him actually underground, getting pulled down by all those hands) to the relatively mundane (playing with a leopard). Craven helped set the tone for the "rubber reality" horror genre with A Nightmare On Elm Street, though this isn't anywhere near as goofy. The psychological/spiritual dangers posed by all this weird shit isn't all he's got to worry about; Haiti's corrupt, sadistic secret police regularly pose a more immediate problem. How sadistic? They go for the scrotum first. The Serpent And The Rainbow does lose its way a bit at the end, with effects-laden action which reminds me a bit of the end of Hellraiser where everything gets solved by using the box as a ray gun. The hallucinations start getting cheesy, the villain, borderline Freddy Krueger-ish. Craven's pop filmmaking doesn't suggest to me a filmmaker who's particularly resistant to studio pressures, and I do have to wonder what here was suggested by the men upstairs. Still, for the most part, this is a much-welcome detour in Craven's catalogue, serious about its fright and well-studied about its subject matter. The political angle is probably the movie's most potent, as it's the one best remembered in history and, for me anyway, a more tangible boogeyman. A corrupt state can threaten anyone's body; I wouldn't be too concerned about them going for my soul, but it's frightening that they would try. BACK TO THE S's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE