The Alchemist

I have an interest in Charles Band's pre-Full Moon work. He produced great films like 'Troll', 'Dolls', 'Ghoulies II', 'Crawlspace', and more. 'The Alchemist' has it's moments, but will leave must viewers scratching their heads. It's got loose ends and a serious consistency problem at the end. Dull scenes don't help keep the viewers' minds on the movie, adding to the confusion. The hitch-hiking scenes towards the beginning of the film are painfully long and sappy plus the stars are not offering particularly stellar performances. In fact, I don't really care for the characters.

The moments of horror are kind of fun for the fans though. There is some creepy (satanic?) sorcery in the woods and demons are released through a portal in a grave yard. Oddly the demons spend more time getting the crud kicked out of them than doing damage, but hey, blood and guts are fun wether of human or demon origin. Gore effects and spooky sets will please fans.

All in all, sad to say, I'll probably forget almost everything about this film within a month.

For twenty years, a friend and I have been going to movies every Sunday. We had seen everything when The Alchemist was released. Without seeing a review, we said to each other "How bad can it be?" That is now our catch phrase for movie going, and The Alchemist gave us the answer: "Not as bad as The Alchemist..."

1871- Robert Ginty's wife is hexed by an evil magician, and a duel ensues. Tragically, the wife ends up dead, and Ginty is cursed to eternal life as a Jeckyll/Hyde type beast. 1955- A woman en route and her male hitch-hiker have car troubles in the remote forest...but it may be more than mere chance that they are in Ginty's "neck of the woods".

What transpires is a watchable, albeit rather juvenile horror film, one that will be unlikely to surface as anyone's favorite film, but entertaining enough to be recommendable to most genre fans. Effects range from weak to fairly impressive, and performances are fairly serviceable for a minor picture of this type.

All in all, not too bad...though hardly essential viewing.

After watching "The Alchemist" I made the unpleasant discovery that lead actor Robert Ginty passed away last September, at the relatively young age of 60, as a result of cancer. It was quite a shock, because tracking down Ginty movies had sort of become a running joke between a buddy and me. With the notable exception of "The Exterminator" - which is a powerfully raw and underrated vigilante exploitation highlight - the name Robert Ginty almost certainly guarantees bad and cheesy but nevertheless entertaining movies. I had tremendous fun watching so-bad- it's-good rubbish flicks like "Scarab", "White Fire", "Warrior of the Lost World" and "Maniac Killer". What made Robert Ginty so cool was that he had a really "dumb" face. There's an expression in my country that perfectly describes his facial expressions and attitude: The light's on but there's nobody home. Michael Moriarty ("Q-The Winged Serpent", "Pale Rider") has that as well. If I could go back in time to the 80's, I'd make a film which stars Robert Ginty and Michael Moriarty as two dim- witted crime fighting brothers. That would be awesome, wouldn't it? Either way, rest in peace Robert Ginty, and thank you for the laughs we had on your account.

Ironically enough, in "The Alchemist" Ginty depicts an immortal man who's doomed to live in the woods like an animal, due to a curse placed upon him by a malignant alchemist in the year 1871. The alchemist lured Aaron McCullen's wife Anna away from him through black magic and hypnotism, but in an attempt to get her back Aaron accidentally kills his wife instead of the evil DelGatto. 84 years later Aaron still lives in the same cabin in the woods, with his daughter who looks old enough to be his mother, and nothing better to do but hunting down deer. But then the 1950's reincarnation of his wife travel through the area, accompanied by a random hitch-hiker, and Aaron sees the opportunity to break the spell once and for all. In all honesty and strangely enough, the basic idea behind "The Alchemist" really isn't that bad at all! The execution is clumsy, with atrocious acting performances and seriously cheesy special effects, but the actual concept is acceptable. The story lines are quite thin and the script is rather senseless, but the film contains some delightful random moments. The acquaintance between Lenora and the hitcher, for example, is hilarious and good for almost fifteen minutes of completely irrelevant padding. She picks up a mysterious guy, they promptly start bickering, she drops him off but gets her car in the mud, he helps her out, she drives off but comes back and they fall in love. It's truly hysterical. Beginning director Charles Band – who did a much better job with this than with the god awful "Parasite" – loses total grip on the film once passed the hour, with cheesy demonic creatures randomly running amok and excessive gore to compensate for the lack of coherence. The charismatic Robert Glaudini is sadly underused as the titular alchemist. A couple of more sequences with his evil appearance would definitely have made the film more horror-like and exciting.

This is a low budget movie, but the people who made it seemed to want to do a good job. The sets and location are good, the photography is very good. You care about the main characters. The special effects aren't state of the art, but are good. Worth seeing.