WARLOCK II: THE ARMAGEDDON
A film review by Tak
Copyright 1993 Mark Takacs
Directed by Anthony Hickox ScreenPlay Kevin Rock & Sam Berard 35mm / color / Trimark & Tapestry 1993 Rated: R Tak rating: Watch it on LATE night cable in a few months. Either that or sucker a friend into renting it for you.
TV-Guide(tm)-Review ------------------- The Son of Satan, reborn every millennium (or thereabouts), tries to unleash his Father on the unsuspecting Earth via a collection of magical runestones while a pack of elderly Druids and their two newest Warrior/Druid inductees fight to contain The Evil One for another millennium.
Tak Summary ------------ Well this screening was sponsored by KUBE 93 in the Seattle area, and I didn't get a chance to obtain any publicity packages from them, so you'll have make due with what I recall from the movie. The actor & other data is from my photocopy of the admission ticket. But it's only been two hours since I left the theatre and when I started typing this, so it should still be pretty fresh.
...In some dark past, the stones that are used to contain or release Satan are lost and scattered when invading hoards burst in on a Druidic ceremony where they have just successfully used the stones to contain the latest incarnation of Satan's son.
Cut to the present, where a beautiful young New York woman becomes instantly pregnant when exposed to a lunar eclipse, promptly gives birth to a blackish glob which scoots across the floor and devours the lady's fluffy white yappy dog (Yea!), and then metamorphs into a fully grown Julian Sands. In one of the only similarities to the first movie, the Warlock channels Satan through the fresh corpse and receives his mission (gather the stones & break Dad out of Hell) and a gruesome map to their current whereabouts.
The rest of the movie flashes back and forth from the Warlock's gradual acquisition of the stones, to the two young warrior/druids' training sessions as they prepare to defend their two stones from the Warlock.
In the final showdown, the elderly druids provide only a monetary pause for the warlock, who chases the two yung'uns to a stonehenge forest clearing, where we are treated to psychic knife-fu, tree-fu, pickup-truck-fu, motorcycle-fu, and lots of spiffy computer graphics. Is the ending ever in doubt? Nope. But I expected I knew how it would end going in and I wasn't disappointed.
Technical Comments ------------------ I don't usually bother with this, because I don't feel qualified to judge that kind of stuff. And I'd rather NOT notice such things. Most of the time, I go to a movie to be entertained in one form or another, not to admire someone's craft. But that's because it's usually done with enough skill that I don't notice such things like sound, editing, composite shots, photography, and whatnot. Well, not this time.
At times, the voices seemed oddly "wrong," almost as if they had been dubbed in afterwards, and in a bathroom chock full of echos. There were multiple instances of "orbiting cameras," as well as several appearances of the "midget cam." It also looked like they were playing with a dual-focus technique ... often one person's face would take up half the screen in profile, with the other person shown on the other half of the screen in the distance. Fine -- except for the monstrously fuzzy area where they fused the two images together.
It also looked like they got a good deal on by-now generic computer effects. A psychic knife-fight with an obviously computer generated dagger, a morph melt-through, digitally erased footage, and plenty of others. Actually, I may be attributing too much to the computers. I'm sure it's more cost effective to use the more classic techniques in some cases.
And of course lots of traditional buckets of blood (the Warlock has *black* blood -- oooh), squishy gore stuff, and melting wax heads. Oh, I almost forgot the "bury-the-guy-in-the-ground-with-a-fake-body" trick like they used for Bishop at the end of Aliens. Lots of fun. Plus I'm sure they used lots of good old fashioned slasher-flick tricks.
Tak Thoughts ------------ I went to this movie cause I love bad B movies. (and Whup-ass movies -- which I define as any movie with an invincible hero(ine) with lots of foot-fu, stick-fu, bullet-fu and anything-else-fu. Current examples include Striking Distance, Hard Target, and Demolition Man.) So I wasn't looking for quality, just a bit of class. I was sorta disappointed.
The first movie had some intriguing ideas (nails in the footprints, old-wives tales that were true, etc) as the witch-hunter from the past tracked down the slowly strengthening Warlock, who had to FIND his powers. In one scene, the Warlock had to stew up a little boy to make a flight potion. But in WARLOCK: THE ARMAGEDDON, watch out -- he's ready to whup-ass from the git-go. To be fair, there's some neat satan-detection gear (slug-o-meter), as well as some voodoo-esque son-of-satan damaging gear (I bet there's no leaves in hell). But I guess I wanted more and better.
Perhaps it's just that time pleasantly obscures my memory, but there didn't seem to be that many sheer buckets of blood and gross-out effects in the first WARLOCK. Well, exception for that one scene with a fried tongue sandwich... blah!
There was a bit of blatant good-guy-stupidity here and there -- if you've got the Son of Satan impaled by your friendly animated tree, you don't just *assume* he's dead, especially if you've just gone a few rounds with him. The whole theatre groaned loudly at this one.
Lots of good/bad/stupid one-liners like the following:
son: "But Dad! why'd you have to kill me!" dad: "You're not dead now..."
Harhar.
Julian Sands *can* act. He can. Really. I've seen him. But he doesn't get much of a chance in this movie. He has one stoic expression pasted on his face through the whole movie (could he be a computer model with a Julian Sands texture map?) except when he gets to thrash around if someone gets in a good shot. Then he gets to grimace and chomp down on those special *black*-foaming-blood capsules. Cool.
There were no attempts to scare the audience either. Thinking back to the first one, I shouldn't have expected any of that, though some flicks of this caliber (the later Freddy Krugers for one) still attempted to throw in the occasional Spring Loaded Cat. (Apologies to "the phantom." I stole his SpringLoadedCatQuotient -- I love it -- it's so *true* -- watch yer typical horror flick and see.) The only anxiety produced is deciding whether you really WANT to view the latest incoming gore, or if you'd rather examine your hands for stray particles of dirt.
I wish they had a bit *less* of a budget, or paid the script and story writers better, instead of buying lots of blood and so-so special effects. As one of my companions remarked when we were leaving the free screening... "I woulda been mad if I had paid any money for that film." My feelings exactly, and we were both fans of the first one.
Oh, well, it'll be great to see it on late night cable soon. I'd love to see what MST or Double Take (the ppl who did Hercules Returns) or even a few friends with attitudes can do for WarLock:The Armageddon.
Principal Crew -------------- Director Anthony Hickox Screen Writer Kevin Rock & Sam Bernard Producer Peter Abrams & Robert L. Levy Executive Producer Roger A Burlage & Andrew Hersh Director of Photography Garry Lively Production Designer Steve Hardie Music Mark McKenzie
Principal Cast -------------- Julian Sands Chris Young Paula Marshall Joanna Pacula
(With the exception of Julian Sands, the didn't seem to be anyone involved in the production of both movies. Hmmmm. )
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