WITCH HUNT (1994) Adequate is not enough Cast A Deadly Spell is a cool little movie that not a heck of a lot of people have seen. It had Fred Ward playing a private detective named H. Philip Lovecraft, in a version of 1940's Los Angeles in which the use of magic is commonplace. But Lovecraft didn't use magic. Anyway, it had Clancy Brown, and a tornado of dollar bills paper-cutting a guy to death. In other words, recommended! Witch Hunt is the sequel to that film, Ward being replaced by Dennis Hopper. It's now the 50's, and magic is still commonplace. But there's a senator out there named Crockett (Eric Bogosian) who is against the unholy use of magic, who says at one point "If God doesn't destroy Hollywood, then he owes Sodom & Gomorrah an apology." (this is paraphrased from some previous source, isn't it?) Anyway, he deems magic use as un-American, and people who are suspected of using magic or having magic-user sympathies are...yeah, you can see where this is going. Now, a lot of this magic use out there really is pretty, uh, questionable, like when celebrated, long-dead writers are resurrected to work on Hollywood blockbusters. I like Shakespeare as much as the next guy, but it would be SO Jerry Bruckheimer to use magic to raise him from the grave so he can be the seventy-fifth writer on Armageddon 2. Please, let the guy stay dead. "I knew a private eye who hired a witch to put a tail on a guy, and the poor bastard had to have it surgically removed," says Lovecraft, in one of the movie's best lines. If you consider this to be a bad line, then be warned, it only gets worse from here. There's a nominal villain in Julian Sands, who for some reason reminds me a lot of Charles Dance in Last Action Hero. The nominal villain gets his own nominal villain plot, which I felt had more potential than the political allegory, but in attempting to juggle both balls, the movie seemed to drop them both. Witch Hunt isn't a bad movie, or even a mediocre movie, it's just not on the ball enough to be a good movie. Hopper, who reportedly said that this was the strangest movie he'd ever been in at the time (no small feat for Hopper), turns in one of his typically one-note but still kinda endearing performances. The whole movie's like that. It's just baaaaaaaarely enough to consistently hold my interest, but nothing more. Watch for Debi Mazar in an adorable curly white wig, and listen for the score by Angelo Badalamenti. You could do a lot worse than Witch Hunt, but Cast A Deadly Spell was much better. BACK TO THE W's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE