Taking revenge with the Necromancer

For the first video to be reviewed on this site I could have chosen worse than Necromancer I thought it would be hard to choose something from the piles of vhs tapes scattered around my house but I opened the cupboard and there is was, at the top of the pile just begging to be watched. I had never actually watched this film before so I mentioned to my husband that I was starting with this and his words were “It’s kind of confronting but ultimately hilarious” how am I supposed to review it better than that?

The best way to do this I believe is in sections, in the order of how I saw things, so…

The cover:

One of the main things I love about VHS and the VHS era are the covers. Most of the time they depicted an artistic rendition of the film’s theme and sometimes it was just a piece of artwork that looked cool that may or may not have anything to do with the movie. This one in particular grabbed my attention with its use of colour, the blue and the red are a nice compliment to each other and the dull tones of the blue and the dark shadows around the neck bring out the stark tones in the title and the red lips. A large amount of blank space is taken up a floating tag line and your attention is drawn to the bottom of the picture where a necklace links on with the title, pretty clever really. If you were judging this movie by the cover (which most of us VHS collectors do) you would assume that this movie is about some kind of mysterious seductress who commands the forces of darkness to exact her revenge through the power of a necklace. Unfortunately that synopsis would be incorrect.

 The back cover displays four seemingly nonviolent pictures, except for one of a young woman with hands covered in goo and a guy screaming either in pain or aggravation. There is also some kind of mystic woman ( does she own the necklace?) and the synopsis tells us that this movie is about a young woman who gets assaulted by some college idiots and in her desperation for revenge enlists the help of a demon conjuring gypsy woman to summon the powers to exact her revenge. Looks like this is going to be a barrel of laughs!

The trailers:

I pop the tape in, which is already rewound (thankyou previous viewer) and sit through the tediously long warning screen and wait for the coming attractions title to come up. This particular video was a treat, my favourite part about renting tapes was to watch the trailers at the beginning, they put a lot of effort into those trailers and a lot of the time they were better than the films themselves. I might have seen the movie I hired out a hundred times but I may not have seen their trailers with it. Most video had between five to eight trailers, this one has eighteen. 

 Let’s count

The gods must be crazy 2: played and then repeated the whole way through again straight afterward, I hate when they do that, I also hated this trailer. There’s funny slapstick and then there is I need to hide from the embarrassment of this movie slapstick.

Skin Deep:  Great movie with John Ritter. I really don’t need to say anymore, if you haven’t seen it watch it immediately.

Toxic Avenger pt. 2: It kept yelling at me that “you must see toxic avenger part 2!” I think it would be bad for my health to refuse.

Conspiracy: SUPER serious film about uptight British politicians embroiled in some sort of...scandal, I think.

Renegades: Keifer Sutherland and Lou Diamond Phillips, awesome. Enough said.

Thunder ground: Kickboxing hobo and his young hobo friend battle Jesse Ventura. Must find this.

Indio: Not sure what is going on but the trailer somehow shows the whole movie. Something about environmental warfare and explosions in the jungle.

Major league: I shouldn’t have to tell anyone anything about this one.

Say Anything: Or this John Cusack classic (swoon)

The last trailer was confusing, it started out as Aliens and then changed to Diehard with voiceover stating that they both smashed home video hire records and then stated that the next big thing is… The Abyss. Can’t really argue there I’m afraid, I love that movie.

After The film there were extended version of the trailers to Skin-deep, Toxic avenger 2, Renegades, Major League, Say Anything and The Gods Must Be Crazy 2 and they also fit in Silent Assassins with Sam Jones as well. I know I cheated because most of them were repeats, but I maintain that there was a hell of a lot of trailers on that video.

The Movie:

The Video, released in 1990 by CBS Fox Video, is in pretty good shape. The tape is undamaged and the cover has stickers all over it but it’s not ripped or torn and the box isn’t broken. The picture and sound quality was really good and my spiffy TV made it all look splendid. There were no tracking lines, skipping or sound loss, pretty impressive for an ex rental.

The film starts with the quintessential “I swear I’m a dorky guy, see look I’m wearing glasses and riding a bike please ignore my muscly physique” dude, spying around an old Gypsy’s house. Weird stereotypical gypsy lady (whose accent isn’t that unbelievable) is having an argument with a random lady about her hurting people, blah blah blah; gyspy kills her telekinetically with an axe. Seems like an awful lot of brain power to waste when you could simply pick up an axe with your hands and do it yourself but hey I suppose waving your arms around like a non-opposable Barbie is fun too.

“Dorky” guy witnesses the carnage and tries to stumble away; the gypsy lady sees him, acts all coy and then vanishes herself and his bike. Just to be a total bitch, she magically steals his bike. I know I’m going to have a good time when a movie makes me laugh within the first five minutes. The next scene introduces us to our protagonist, when I first saw her I thought she had kind of a Laura Palmer vibe going for her and then suddenly Russ Tamblyn shows up and I throw my hands in the air. He’s playing a creepy professor who takes advantage of his vulnerable students and gets them to do “breathing exercises” for him. I’d like to think that he didn’t type cast himself.

Some pretty awful stuff happens to this girl involving frat boy idiots breaking and entering to steal test results, just when you thought it was all just animal house antics and upbeat music, sudden rape. The stereotypes are everywhere, the impossibly narcissistic sociopath group leader, the best friend who isn’t really into it but is so co-dependent on his buddy he’ll do it just to get closer to him and the fat friend in the background who didn’t participate, felt super bad about it but did nothing so is equally guilty. Every single character does achingly stupid things. Not going to call the police? No good reason not to? Allow people to blackmail you with information that you freely tell multiple people? Decide to not tell your boyfriend anything about anything until he is a nervous wreck by the end of the film? Makes perfect sense. The only thing this movie did right was establish that once the other characters found out about what happened to her they didn’t give a single fuck about their grisly fate. If you’re a rapist or a rapist sympathizer you’re going to get your face ripped off by a demon. There was only one character who tried to use the whole situation to get what he wanted and then he ended up getting hell up his ass too.

The kills were okay, infrequent and somewhat lazy. 

The demon in question was title actress Elizabeth Kaitan (star of Slave girls from Beyond Infinity, awesome movie) but only in appearance. She would give them the come on and then we would see her eyes which had been coloured in bright green in Microsoft Paint. Her hands would get all goopy and she would do something off camera, they scream, next scene. No gore or blood effects. Kaitan’s sex appeal is there but if was paired with more vicious violence I think that this movie would be more well received. The fact that none of these dudes think that it’s odd that the girl that they wronged just shows up out of the blue and is all hot for it. They let her do her thing and look down at their crotch and BOOM demon face in their business. Are they really that hard up that they don’t question it when some naked lady appears in their shower inside a locked bathroom? Or when, you know, she starts growling.

As with most horror films they attempt to say something meaningful with their story. Although this is a very simplistic story of revenge and vulnerability if we wanted to dig deeper we could theorize that this film is about the process of a victim’s anger. The Gypsy woman vows to bestow upon Julie (Elizabeth Kaitan) the power to exact revenge on all who make her angry but the point is that a lot of her anger rises and deflates in stages. She doesn’t really want anyone to die, she just wants people to acknowledge what happened to her, for them to be punished and not ever do it again. The demon attacks wherever her anger is directed, first at those who wronged her, then to those who are closest to her who don’t fully understand what she going through, she tried to keep the beast away from them because she knows that they don’t deserve it so ultimately the last person attacked is herself. She must face her inner darkness to push past it and become whole again, without letting anyone get away with their wrong doings. Or it could have all just been a great excuse to see Elizabeth Kaitan in a teddy.

I enjoyed this movie quite a lot, it was stupid and the effects were bad. It had moments where it was being very serious and effectively not realising how silly it was being but the acting wasn’t terrible and the film was well paced. In the area of VHS trash pacing makes such a huge difference, when you are stuck in the middle of a film watching the insufferable teens walk around the woods shouting “Tommy! Tommy!” for fifteen minutes, you get so damn angry you just want to throw a shoe at your spiffy TV. This movie felt like 88 minutes, not drawn out and not rushed, it made me smile and I really can’t fault this movie for trying its hardest. The question I’m left with though is why the hell was it banned in Queensland Australia?