Hellmaster

Hellmaster has a few things going for it. The best is that it scored two good horror names in the cast: John Saxon (A Nightmare on Elm Street) and David Emge (Dawn of the Dead). The second best is the storyline involving Saxon as an insane professor experimenting on the homeless and his college students with a drug he calls the reward. David Emge plays opposite Saxon as the hero who's been tracking him for years. After his "death", Saxon returns to campus twenty or so years later to further his experiments. He and his army of the homeless drive around in the Happy Face Bible School bus with a huge cross strapped to the grill. It's the creepiest bus I've ever seen. There's a great scene where one of Saxon's minions is driving around a campus security car dragging the guard's bloody body. There is also imagery of bleeding walls, mutant junkies, and scarification. Hellmaster has the making to be a good horror movie but most people find it hard to get past the terrible acting (other than Saxon). And there are a few other stupid elements in the movie. Like why would a college student carry around a whip, people in trouble saying Mayday, and other atrocities. I don't know if it was the film it was shot on, but sometimes it feels like a home movie too. Eighties horror fans should still enjoy, I know I do.

At last, this films gets a rework that it so richly deserved. Way cooler than the '92 cut. Douglas Schulze has proven that you can make really cool horror films on a shoestring budget, without sacrificing production value. Mike Goi's cinematography and color palete are reminicient of Dario's masterpiece "Susperia". Saxon is dead on as the insane college professor (we've all had a share of these types in our lives!) and David Emgee adds a "Kolchek-the Night Stalker" coolness to his role as the investigative reporter. But who can forget Ron Asheton of "Iggy Pop and the Stooges" dressed as a psychotic nun! If you dig creepy, stylish horror films, this one is for you!

When you're an avid fan of a certain B-movie star, you inevitably also have to struggle yourself through tons of irredeemably bad low-budget movies simply because your idol made the unwise career choice of starring in them. For instance, being a fan of Jeffrey Combs caused me to suffer movies like "Cellar Dweller" and "Lurking Fear", and I felt the need to endure "Dracula 3000" and something called "Revenant" only because I like Udo Kier. Now, I'm an even bigger admirer of John Saxon than I am of Jeffrey Combs and Udo Kier combined, and thus even pure crap like "Hellmaster" becomes fundamental viewing! Big, big, BIG mistake, as this is a hopelessly retarded horror movie and even Saxon's sinister performance can't save it. The script of this thing is completely senseless and dumb, yet somehow it has the pretension of being an ambitious and even intellectual tale of terror. Saxon occasionally appears as a demented professor who tested a newly invented mental drug on a bunch of homeless people back in 1969. Things went a little wrong and the guinea pigs turned into deformed monsters. Now, more than 20 years later, he's back in the catacombs of a university for gifted people (yet, all the students are rather stupid) and he hopes to pick up his experiments. Our nutty professor is hindered by an obtrusive journalist (David Emge) who lost his wife to the drug as well as by some redundant students. The structure implemented by director Douglas Schulze is terribly annoying. Pointless flashbacks are followed by present days events and then stupidly blend with hallucination scenes and sub plots. It feels like Schulze wants his viewers to connect the pieces of the puzzle themselves, but you just don't care about it enough to do that. Quite a few gory murders are committed by the freak-monster shown on the DVD-cover (some kind of crossover between Hellraiser's Pinhead and Pumpkinhead), but I never really figured out whether he was one of the homeless guys or one of the fresh student species. John Saxon acts on automatic pilot, as if he very well realizes it's an inferior production, and the rest of the cast is downright abominable. This piece of junk somehow managed to gather a small fan base, but my advise it so skip it, even if you consider John Saxon to be a demigod.

A Michigan-lensed horror flick featuring John Saxon and David Emge ("Flyboy" from DOTD), this one shows potential but eventually just falls apart. In the 1960s, Prof. Jones (Saxon) is conducting an experiment on some coeds that goes horrible wrong. He develops a drug that turns them into mutants. He is stopped (or so we think) and flash forward 20 years where it all starts again with 80s students. This one is a real oddity. I can't for the life of me remember what the drug Saxon developed was supposed to do. On the plus side, Saxon has an interesting group of mutated helpers (a mutated boy, bald schoolgirl, nun, and homeless man nicknamed Razorface - Pinhead anyone?). Saxon gives a fine performance but is only in the film for 15 minutes tops. And Emge is good as the Reggie Bannister character who is hunting down the mad doc who killed his family. The rest of the cast is blah.

You could say "Hellmaster" is one of those forgotten, daft on-the-cheap b-horror films, which gains ones interest with cult actors like David "Flyboy" Emge from the original "Dawn of the Dead" and the always suave John Saxon. The premise sounds like it can be fun, but you don't expect a good film. You just hoped to be entertained. It does that… well not at all times. What starts off rather interesting and ghastly (as I was thinking it's like something out of Clive Barker's mind), despite its randomly crude handling soon it becomes a boring muddle of aimless occurrences, a real lack of exposition shows from its clumsy script and fragmented editing only confuses even more. Then tack on its preachy religious subtext. The drearily hellish activity takes place on a campus with a terrible history, as Saxon plays the demented professor Jones who tests out a drug on the homeless which genetically disfigures them turning each homicidal as they follow him back to his university in their bus of doom. They serve him, as his known as Papa (???) to them. Waiting for him is a reporter (Emge), who did the story on him that unmasked the horrific experiments he was doing on the students on the campus in the past. Now Dr. Jones is back, he plans to experiment again on a new lot of students while his army simply loiter around injecting themselves or having some fun with a use of sickle but Jones might have met his match as one of the co-eds has psychic abilities. It's completely nonsensical and choppy (Jones has projectile powers?), but where it stands out is its competent use of make-up effects and there's some creativity within some sequences. I liked the campus setting, where the director tried to install Gothic atmospherics with his use of neon lighting or at times a lack of it amongst dark, shadowy corridors. Does it work? Not all the time, but some attempts have effective visuals. Jolts are cheaply done. Performances are mainly lousy and forgettable. Saxon seems to be sleepwalking through it, Emge looks all lost and Amy Raasch is capable enough as the heroine. While it seems to cop a real shellacking, this quickly made production has few, if clunky thrills.

"They're coming."