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DVD The Serpent And The Rainbow
Eight years before he scored a phenomenal hit with Scream, horror master Wes Craven made a worthy effort to "legitimize" horror with this chilling supernatural thriller, based on the best-selling book by Wade Davis. More ambitious than most horror films, this one allowed Craven to generate compelling plausibility with the fact-based story of a Harvard researcher (Bill Pullman) who travels to Haiti to procure a secret voodoo powder that places people into a state of simulated death. His investigation into the hidden world of black magic grows increasingly dangerous until he's caught in a living nightmare--a potentially deadly predicament that inspired the film's advertising tag line: "Don't bury me... I'm not dead!" Craven pays particular attention to authentic details of Haitian society and the role voodoo plays in Haitian culture, and the film gains additional atmosphere from location shooting in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Craven would, of course, continue to thrive by making more "conventional" horror films including Scream, but this remains a fascinating departure for one of the genre's most celebrated directors. - -Jeff Shannon
In "The Serpent and the Rainbow" Wes Craven once again shows us that he knows how to make horror really scary; all the horror and gore is fine, but you must remember to make the characters human and real. No where is this better shown than in Dennis Alan (pre-famous Bill Pullman), a Harvard professor that is interested in the so called 'zombie drug', a medican that vodoo culture uses to slow down the heart enough to render the patient (or victim) nearly comatose. The film is based on the bestselling (and highly convraversial) non-fiction book by Wade Davis, who spent time in Haiti researching the zombie phanomanon. The movie is a good look at modern voodoo culture, not the sterotypical attitude taken by most Hollywood horror movies. As a documentery it is a great movie. But it has a melodramatic story about an evil wizard who 'zombifies' Alan to get him out of the way and cover up some crimes. That is a little silly and the magical fight at the end and the light show is also too much. But it is a great movie that takes a little known subject seriously. It has good performances and is well directed. The scenes about the culture are a delight to watch. Truelly an under appreciated effort by Craven.
The Serpent And The Ra9inbow
The Movie was great but the captions took away from the movie.
Had I kn0own that the film was captioned I would not have bought the film.
Voodoo sucks...it's garbage!
This probably won't be a very popular review here and I hate to rain on everyone's parade, but HorrorMan has got to do what HorrorMan has got to do. As you may have guessed by now, I can't say I was overly impressed with Wes Craven's "The Serpent and the Rainbow". In a sense, I wasn't all that disappointed because this time I was somewhat prepared for what I was getting into. If you like Voodoo magic and all that stuff, you will probably like this movie, but I failed to see the horror in it all..."The Serpent and The Rainbow" is another one of those "far out" and "blow your mind" type of movies that is just way out there on a limb and because people haven't really seen anything like it, they get all excited about it, but when you really think about it, this is just a boring movie that is drawn out and lacking in credibility, substance and theatrical cohesion. "The Serpent and The Rainbow" just isn't very stimulating at all and the result is a largely boring movie with laughable scenes that are supposed to be scary or shocking. The only thing that is scary about this movie is the thought of being buried alive, but that's enough to make a movie out of it and the Voodoo magic thing is so over the top and far fetched that one can't help but long for the good ole days of horror movies like "The Shining", "Halloween" and "The Omen". "The Serpent and The Rainbow" is border-line to almost pure rubbish material as far as its merits as a horror movie are concerned. The most powerful drug in this movie is the movie itself and its ability to make you go to sleep at night.
John Schlesinger's The Believers, a kind of voodoo twist on Rosemary's Baby, is a horror movie where the echoes of otherworldly menace set the tone of terror, but the real evil comes from the hearts of humans. Recently widowed psychologist Martin Sheen moves to New York with his emotionally fragile son, and they become entwined in an underground cult that practices ritual sacrifice of children. Schlesinger is more interested in the human tale of loss and healing and the desperation of a grieving father fighting to protect his only child from a barbarous cabal. He favors mood and menace over spectacular splashes of horror, and even those moments of occult attack are directed with a sly sense of ambiguity. Though overlong and short on moments of genuine terror, this is a rare... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Martin Sheen Director(s): John Schlesinger DVD Release Date: Released the 27 August 2002 Usually ships within 24 hours
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Vietnam veteran Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) thinks he is going insane. Or worse. When his nightmares begin spilling into his waking hours, Jacob believes he is experiencing the aftereffects of a powerful drug tested on him during Vietnam. Or perhaps his posttraumatic stress disorder is worse than most. Whatever is happening to him, it is not good. Director Adrian Lyne sparks our interest and maintains high production values, but this confusing film chokes on its "surprise" ending. It owes much to Ambrose Bierce's haunting and more straightforward story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek." Written by Bruce Joel Rubin, who also explored the "other side" in Ghost and My Life, it ultimately feels like an exercise in self-indulgence. A spirited performance by Elizabeth Peña... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Tim Robbins Director(s): Adrian Lyne DVD Release Date: Released the 21 August 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Set in Harlem and New Orleans in 1955, this supernatural thriller stirred a brief controversy when released in 1987 because some scenes featuring Lisa Bonet (then a popular cast member of The Cosby Show) were considered too sexually explicit to be rated R. The edited material was restored for the unrated video release, and the movie now makes a fitting double bill with Fallen, with its similar plot about a sullen detective (Mickey Rourke) who is hired to find a missing person by a shady client with pointy fingernails named Louis Cyphre (Lucifer, get it?), played with subtle menace by Robert De Niro. Rourke's investigation leads him into an underworld of voodoo and forbidden desires, and as the mystery unfolds director Alan Parker fills every scene with conspicuous style and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Mickey Rourke - Robert De Niro Director(s): Alan Parker DVD Release Date: Released the 18 May 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The B picture lives on in the films of John Carpenter. Prince of Darkness weds supernatural horror with quantum weirdness, when a group of theoretical-physics students, led by their professor, Birack (Victor Wong), joins forces with a priest (Donald Pleasence) to forestall the coming of the Dark Lord. His Darkness has been imprisoned in a cylindrical container as a swirling green plasma since time immemorial, and is now beginning to find his way out. All of this is bolstered by a lot of fancy science talk (all of which is real, I can assure you--someone did his homework), which allows us to settle down, say okey dokey, and enjoy the thrills that this presages. As the title character spreads his contagion through the group of students, holed up in a church to study the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Donald Pleasence - Lisa Blount Director(s): John Carpenter DVD Release Date: Released the 07 October 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The mind-bending worlds of author H.P. Lovecraft have long interested horror directors, but the films have rarely successfully captured his nightmarish mix of madness and mythology. John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness is not directly based on Lovecraft's work, but screenwriter Michael De Luca draws his inspiration from Lovecraft's Cthulu mythology and then adds his own ingenious twists. John Trent (Sam Neill), an insurance investigator recently fitted for a straightjacket, tells his story to a psychiatrist. Hired to track down the missing pop-horror phenomena Sutter Cane, a Stephen King-like author whose fans are literally made for his books, Trent finds the supposedly fictional Hobb's End. He watches the town collapse into madness, murder, and monstrous transformations: the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Sam Neill - Jürgen Prochnow Director(s): John Carpenter DVD Release Date: Released the 08 February 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
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