Warlock is a top-notch horror-comedy that still stands the test of time (with a few caveats, of course)
Let me start off by giving Warlock what seems to be a backhanded compliment. It really is the best Terminator ripoff ever filmed. And even if it wasn’t, it would still be the most inventive.
We’ve got an unstoppable killing machine that doesn’t respond to logic — only it’s not a cyborg from the future, it’s a sorcerer from the past who magically gets whisked away to Los Angeles in the late 1980s. Hot on his trail is our Kyle Reese equivalent, a hunky barbarian dude who kinda looks like a slightly lower quality but hopefully way less racist version of Mel Gibson. And stuck in the middle is Lori Singer — yep, Ariel from Footloose — playing a version of Sarah Connor who spends half of the movie in hilariously awful rapid aging makeup.
Warlock sounds like a complete mess of a movie, and yeah, it kinda’ is. But it’s a beautiful mess of a motion picture that keeps knocking it out of the park over and over again. Every time you think this movie can’t possibly top itself, it does. Early on in the movie there’s a scene where the titular character (played by Julian Sands) French kisses Lori’s gay roommate … only to chomp his tongue off and spit it into a sizzling frying pan for brunch. You’re like “well, nothing else in this movie is going to beat that” and in the VERY next scene, we get to watch Mary Woronov turn into a demonic skank and get her eyeballs plucked out.
The whole movie is like that. It’s just one amazing, outrageous moment after the other. You think this movie hits its apogee when the Warlock curses an Amish dude and makes blood start pouring out of his pupils, then we watch Sands abduct a trailer park kid and boil his fat into flying potion. It’s like Warlock had a totally unfilmable script but the people who made it said “you know what, who cares if we don’t have the money or manpower, let’s do it anyway.” This movie was willed into greatness despite a glaring lack of resources and it’s nothing short of awe-inspiring.
Tonally it’s an interesting movie. It’s got a TON of gross-out gore in it — including some downright disgusting foot-based trauma even I have a hard time watching — but it’s also a fairly self-aware half-comedy. Like, sometimes Lori will pretty much break the fourth wall and crack jokes like she was directly speaking to the camera.
And my god, the dialogue in this movie. There’s literally a scene where the heroic Giles Redferne screams “ALL OF CREATION BECOMES SATAN’S BLACK HELL-BESMEARED FARTING HOLE!” and he delivers it with the seriousness of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. Like I said upfront, this is an amazing movie in so many facets.
It might be a little surprising to learn that the film was directed by Steve Miner. He’s the same guy who gave us the second and third Friday the 13th movies, Halloween: H20 and Lake Placid. It doesn’t necessarily seems like the kind of material that he would be into, then you remember “hey, this is the same guy who directed House, isn’t it?” Rather amazingly, the last film he directed before Warlock was 1986’s Soul Man … so yeah, nothing he could possibly oversee in THIS movie could be as problematic or regrettable as that one.
I’m happy to see Warlock has become something of a low-key cult classic as of late. It’s one of those movies that used to come on the Sci-Fi Channel at like three in the morning on school nights and I’d always watch the whole thing through. It’s absurd, but never disingenuous. You totally get the idea that Julian’s character is evil incarnate and even when the movie is meant to be funny it still has a sinister and macabre edge to it. A lot of the film’s success can be attributed to the script from David Twohy, a guy who would go on to have tremendous success in Hollywood (with The Fugitive) and then not so much success (long story short: he wrote Waterworld.)
It’s a tight, punchy script that does a lot of things no other horror movies were doing at the time. There’s a scene on an airplane, in particular, that’s borderline genius. The hero played by Richard E. Grant keeps “mistaking” all these aspects of modernity — like people putting creamer in their coffee and using lighters for in-flight cigarettes — as indications that the plane has been bewitched. Lori, of course, manages to calm him down … only for it to be revealed that the Warlock has been a stowaway in the baggage area the whole time. Nothing in the film is a total throwaway, and let’s give that dude some credit, he has one of the greatest Chekov’s guns ever in this movie — or, more fittingly, Chekov’s insulin needle. No spoilers, but man, is the ending of this movie just fabulous.
There’s so much to love about this movie. It’s a prime example of a horror/comedy hybrid that gets the equation right and its manic energy is totally contagious. It’s one of those VHS-era staples I can pick up and watch just about anytime, and as dated as it may be in some respects, it still holds up much better than most of is contemporaries.
Of course, the passage of time has done a number on this movie. In a movie filled with curses and demonic lightning bolts and levitating child murderers, you know what the most unbelievable thing about the entire film is? That in 1989, a dude could bring a giant metal weathervane onto a flight without getting hassled by anybody. Talk about a totally different point in time, huh?
