THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1988 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: American anthropologist is pulled into the world of voodoo and politics in Haiti during the fall of Duvalier. Only in Haiti could a zombie story and a political thriller fit so well together. The storyline gets muddled at times and cliched at others, but this could have been a very good and a powerful film and just barely missed it. Surprisingly solid effort from Wes Craven. Rating: +1.
It has been a while since we have seen a real zombie film being made. I do not mean the various imitations of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. The creatures in those films are usually called "zombies" or "ghouls," though they certainly are not zombies and they are just the opposite of ghouls. But films about the voodoo-reanimated dead have not been around much since the 1950s. Now Wes Craven, whose stock and trade used to be low-budget films with weak stories, and more recently has struck paydirt with the "Elm Street" films, has made a true zombie film with the genuine gloss of a big- budget production. Big-budget in this cases means actually filming in Haiti (and the Dominican Republic) and filling in at least the supporting roles with some impressive names: names like Cathy Tyson (of MONA LISA), Broadway actor Zakes Mokae (of MASTER HAROLD AND THE BOYS), Paul Winfield, and, like a blast from the past, Michael Gough.
A much less familiar Bill Pullman plays Dennis Alan, a Harvard-bred anthropologist who goes to Haiti to try and find a mysterious drug that makes people appear dead enough to be buried, but leaves them alive. (Okay, so maybe these are not true zombies either, but the idea of a zombie-fying drug has been around since the classic zombie film WHITE ZOMBIE, perhaps even back to ROMEO AND JULIET.) In Haiti during the fall of Baby Doc Duvalier, Alan finds himself enmeshed in a web of politics as well as voodoo. In fact, one of the points made by the script is that in Haiti religion, politics, and voodoo are inextricably intertwined. As psychiatrist Marielle (played by Tyson) tells Alan, Haiti is 80% Catholic and 110% voodoo. As well as being a horror film, THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW is in no small part a political thriller also. Haiti is portrayed as being a sort of voodocracy in which most public officials practice the arts.
While the story is ultimately simplistic and disappointing, it does paint a powerful portrait of a society in which public officials can threaten not only the body but also the soul. Mixing church and state is bad enough; when the mixture also includes a potent dose of destructive magic, you have real trouble. While this is a fantasy in which magic works, the film's most frightening sequences depend only on people believing the voodoo, not on the actual efficacy of the art. And because voodoo really is believed in in Haiti, these scenes may not be far from true. For confused narrative and for the letdown of the cliched last five minutes, I rate this film only a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale, but I think somewhere deep down these really is some of the film that actors like Tyson and Mokae must have thought they were making.
Mark R. Leeper
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Copyright 1988 Mark R. Leeper
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