The ever-distant Ninth Gate review/possible podcast has suddenly become slightly more distant, for I am wondering what it is I managed to obtain for $5 at Wal-Mart last night.
It's a 1985 movie about grave robbery called The Doctor and the Devils, which through some malign operation of fate I've never heard of until now. Grave robbing holds only the tiniest of morbid fascinations for me, but the cast of this movie is so full of actors I adore that I can only conclude (with my native pessimism) that I have stumbled on the Love Actually of horror cinema.
Check it out:
Tim Curry. I trust I don't have to explain to anyone why I love Frank N. Furter/Dr. Poole/Long John Silver/that Satanesque guy in Legend, do I?
Jonathan Pryce. Governor, schmovernor: to me he will always be the thrillingly sinister Mr. Dark from Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Julian Sands. Note that this would be right around the time he was flashing his willy as George Emerson in A Room With a View.
Stephen Rea. Almost certainly my favorite part of Ready To Wear. "...I think she means...'negotiations'."
Patrick Stewart. I'm not even going to bother elaborating on this one.
Philip Davis AND Philip Jackson. Two actors from the Robin of Sherwood series I adored as a child (Jackson was Abbot Hugo, brother of the Sheriff of Nottingham; Davis played a wonderfully mean and sleazy King John). To this day I delight in spotting cast in other roles, and to find a twofer like this is quite a prize.
Also: screenplay based on a work by Dylan Thomas.
This can't possibly be any good, can it? Review to come.
UPDATE, AN AWFUL LOT LATER: Well... it sucked. Not because a temporary blindness led me to confuse Dalton with Curry on the Tim front (that makes more sense: Tim Curry and Stephen Rea are physically similar enough to cause confusion in a movie among the five people who don't know about Rocky Horror). I'm hard-pressed to explain why, though. The set pieces were good, and Phyllis "Lady Jane from Lovejoy" Logan looked gorgeous through the whole production. The plot wasn't bad, if you can imagine melding a thinly disguised tale of Burke and Hare with the sinister-doings-back-here, ingenue-love-plot-over-there structure of Sweeney Todd. As drunken murderers out to steal bodies or make them, Rea and Pryce are genuinely terrifying, particularly in a scene where they torment and kill an old lady fresh off the boat from Ireland.
The Doctor and the Devils is almost startlingly less than the sum of its parts, and unfortunately, I can't even be that nice about my podcasting skills. It's going to take practice before I'm ready to unleash my voice on an unwary world, so no audio reviews for the foreseeable future.
3 comments:
A little late on this, but I just started watching "Robin of Sherwood" recently. Once one stops laughing onself sick at the sight of poor Michael Praed scampering through the undergrowth to Clannad, it's actually pretty good. My fave was Nickolas Grace, whose performance as the Sherriff of Nottingham did the audience's job of realizing how crap it could all potentially be.
It's interesting how my focus on that show has changed: when I was ten, I started watching because of a huge crush on Praed in Dynasty...a couple of years later it was Guy of Gisburne and Nasir. Now the Sheriff is one of my favorites, too, and spotting RoS cast members in other things has become something of a hobby.
I'm trying to steel myself to rent that crap vampire movie Jason Connery and Mark Ryan made together a while back, but I'm not quite there yet.
It's interesting how my focus on that show has changed: when I was ten, I started watching because of a huge crush on Praed in Dynasty...a couple of years later it was Guy of Gisburne and Nasir. Now the Sheriff is one of my favorites, too, and spotting RoS cast members in other things has become something of a hobby.
I'm trying to steel myself to rent that crap vampire movie Jason Connery and Mark Ryan made together a while back, but I'm not quite there yet.
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