Hellmaster

Hellmaster has a few things going for it. The best is that it scored two good horror names in the cast: John Saxon (A Nightmare on Elm Street) and David Emge (Dawn of the Dead). The second best is the storyline involving Saxon as an insane professor experimenting on the homeless and his college students with a drug he calls the reward. David Emge plays opposite Saxon as the hero who's been tracking him for years. After his "death", Saxon returns to campus twenty or so years later to further his experiments. He and his army of the homeless drive around in the Happy Face Bible School bus with a huge cross strapped to the grill. It's the creepiest bus I've ever seen. There's a great scene where one of Saxon's minions is driving around a campus security car dragging the guard's bloody body. There is also imagery of bleeding walls, mutant junkies, and scarification. Hellmaster has the making to be a good horror movie but most people find it hard to get past the terrible acting (other than Saxon). And there are a few other stupid elements in the movie. Like why would a college student carry around a whip, people in trouble saying Mayday, and other atrocities. I don't know if it was the film it was shot on, but sometimes it feels like a home movie too. Eighties horror fans should still enjoy, I know I do.

When you're an avid fan of a certain B-movie star, you inevitably also have to struggle yourself through tons of irredeemably bad low-budget movies simply because your idol made the unwise career choice of starring in them. For instance, being a fan of Jeffrey Combs caused me to suffer movies like "Cellar Dweller" and "Lurking Fear", and I felt the need to endure "Dracula 3000" and something called "Revenant" only because I like Udo Kier. Now, I'm an even bigger admirer of John Saxon than I am of Jeffrey Combs and Udo Kier combined, and thus even pure crap like "Hellmaster" becomes fundamental viewing! Big, big, BIG mistake, as this is a hopelessly retarded horror movie and even Saxon's sinister performance can't save it. The script of this thing is completely senseless and dumb, yet somehow it has the pretension of being an ambitious and even intellectual tale of terror. Saxon occasionally appears as a demented professor who tested a newly invented mental drug on a bunch of homeless people back in 1969. Things went a little wrong and the guinea pigs turned into deformed monsters. Now, more than 20 years later, he's back in the catacombs of a university for gifted people (yet, all the students are rather stupid) and he hopes to pick up his experiments. Our nutty professor is hindered by an obtrusive journalist (David Emge) who lost his wife to the drug as well as by some redundant students. The structure implemented by director Douglas Schulze is terribly annoying. Pointless flashbacks are followed by present days events and then stupidly blend with hallucination scenes and sub plots. It feels like Schulze wants his viewers to connect the pieces of the puzzle themselves, but you just don't care about it enough to do that. Quite a few gory murders are committed by the freak-monster shown on the DVD-cover (some kind of crossover between Hellraiser's Pinhead and Pumpkinhead), but I never really figured out whether he was one of the homeless guys or one of the fresh student species. John Saxon acts on automatic pilot, as if he very well realizes it's an inferior production, and the rest of the cast is downright abominable. This piece of junk somehow managed to gather a small fan base, but my advise it so skip it, even if you consider John Saxon to be a demigod.

A Michigan-lensed horror flick featuring John Saxon and David Emge ("Flyboy" from DOTD), this one shows potential but eventually just falls apart. In the 1960s, Prof. Jones (Saxon) is conducting an experiment on some coeds that goes horrible wrong. He develops a drug that turns them into mutants. He is stopped (or so we think) and flash forward 20 years where it all starts again with 80s students. This one is a real oddity. I can't for the life of me remember what the drug Saxon developed was supposed to do. On the plus side, Saxon has an interesting group of mutated helpers (a mutated boy, bald schoolgirl, nun, and homeless man nicknamed Razorface - Pinhead anyone?). Saxon gives a fine performance but is only in the film for 15 minutes tops. And Emge is good as the Reggie Bannister character who is hunting down the mad doc who killed his family. The rest of the cast is blah.

At last, this films gets a rework that it so richly deserved. Way cooler than the '92 cut. Douglas Schulze has proven that you can make really cool horror films on a shoestring budget, without sacrificing production value. Mike Goi's cinematography and color palete are reminicient of Dario's masterpiece "Susperia". Saxon is dead on as the insane college professor (we've all had a share of these types in our lives!) and David Emgee adds a "Kolchek-the Night Stalker" coolness to his role as the investigative reporter. But who can forget Ron Asheton of "Iggy Pop and the Stooges" dressed as a psychotic nun! If you dig creepy, stylish horror films, this one is for you!

I apologise in advance if this comment isn't very enlightening, but after watching the DVD, reading the blurb on the back of the box, and checking out what others have to say, I still don't know what Hellmaster is really about. Terrible editing, a confusing script, and dark cinematography, plus a plot that is almost impossible to fathom, all go to make this one a bit of a head scratcher.

I understand that the great John Saxon is some kind of scientist who has developed a drug that he tests on homeless people, and that David Emge (Flyboy from Romero's Dawn of the Dead) is trying to stop him; I can see that a bunch of students are being offed by Saxon's mutated guinea pigs (who have silly names like Joey Monkey Boy and Bobby Razor Face), but why they are doing so escapes me. Beyond that, though, I haven't a clue.

Why are the mutants all disfigured in different ways? Where did the killer nun come from? Who painted that big spiral on the wall behind John Saxon? How did they find such a dreadful actress to play the little girl (she's all grown up by now, so I don't feel too bad criticising her performance)? These are just a few of the questions you'll find yourself asking about this execrable excuse for a horror film.

Oh well, at least there are some silly gore effects, and hottie Amy Raasch, who reminds me a bit of a young Jennifer Connelly, gets stripped down to her undies (the whole gubbins, sussies and all) and then takes off her bra to flash her thruppennies!