L'alchimiste

For twenty years, a friend and I have been going to movies every Sunday. We had seen everything when The Alchemist was released. Without seeing a review, we said to each other "How bad can it be?" That is now our catch phrase for movie going, and The Alchemist gave us the answer: "Not as bad as The Alchemist..."

1871- Robert Ginty's wife is hexed by an evil magician, and a duel ensues. Tragically, the wife ends up dead, and Ginty is cursed to eternal life as a Jeckyll/Hyde type beast. 1955- A woman en route and her male hitch-hiker have car troubles in the remote forest...but it may be more than mere chance that they are in Ginty's "neck of the woods".

What transpires is a watchable, albeit rather juvenile horror film, one that will be unlikely to surface as anyone's favorite film, but entertaining enough to be recommendable to most genre fans. Effects range from weak to fairly impressive, and performances are fairly serviceable for a minor picture of this type.

All in all, not too bad...though hardly essential viewing.

The audience for The Alchemist is, admittedly, limited. But those who remember hokey 80s bum-budget fare fondly will probably be fairly tolerant of this unspecial Charles Band outing.

We're introduced to a hitchhiker, John Sanderford, who gets picked up by a cute waitress, Lucinda Dooling, who's been having occult visions that interfere with her driving. Meanwhile, fleshy-faced Robert Ginty, star of one of the quintessential cheapcrud vigilante films, The Exterminator, here has an even more lowbrow role as a man plagued by a werewolf-like curse. Somehow, this quasi-werewolf glassblower's destiny seems to be linked with that of the waitress, who bears an uncanny resemblance to his dead wife. Robert Glaudini, weird star of Band's lurid masterpiece Parasite, has a small role as the title character (?).

If all of that sounds complicated, don't worry, because it isn't. The Alchemist is pretty casual viewing, fairly uneventful, actually, and won't appeal to people with 21st century attention spans. Those who stick with it, however, will at least be treated to a gateway to Hell, a couple of neat if not particularly formidable demons, and maybe a few moments approximating scares. Tame as a whole, The Alchemist does have some brief gross/gory scenes; my favorite is the white and green slime oozing out of a dead demon's head.

A guilty pleasure - one for all you Bandites out there.

After watching "The Alchemist" I made the unpleasant discovery that lead actor Robert Ginty passed away last September, at the relatively young age of 60, as a result of cancer. It was quite a shock, because tracking down Ginty movies had sort of become a running joke between a buddy and me. With the notable exception of "The Exterminator" - which is a powerfully raw and underrated vigilante exploitation highlight - the name Robert Ginty almost certainly guarantees bad and cheesy but nevertheless entertaining movies. I had tremendous fun watching so-bad- it's-good rubbish flicks like "Scarab", "White Fire", "Warrior of the Lost World" and "Maniac Killer". What made Robert Ginty so cool was that he had a really "dumb" face. There's an expression in my country that perfectly describes his facial expressions and attitude: The light's on but there's nobody home. Michael Moriarty ("Q-The Winged Serpent", "Pale Rider") has that as well. If I could go back in time to the 80's, I'd make a film which stars Robert Ginty and Michael Moriarty as two dim- witted crime fighting brothers. That would be awesome, wouldn't it? Either way, rest in peace Robert Ginty, and thank you for the laughs we had on your account.

Ironically enough, in "The Alchemist" Ginty depicts an immortal man who's doomed to live in the woods like an animal, due to a curse placed upon him by a malignant alchemist in the year 1871. The alchemist lured Aaron McCullen's wife Anna away from him through black magic and hypnotism, but in an attempt to get her back Aaron accidentally kills his wife instead of the evil DelGatto. 84 years later Aaron still lives in the same cabin in the woods, with his daughter who looks old enough to be his mother, and nothing better to do but hunting down deer. But then the 1950's reincarnation of his wife travel through the area, accompanied by a random hitch-hiker, and Aaron sees the opportunity to break the spell once and for all. In all honesty and strangely enough, the basic idea behind "The Alchemist" really isn't that bad at all! The execution is clumsy, with atrocious acting performances and seriously cheesy special effects, but the actual concept is acceptable. The story lines are quite thin and the script is rather senseless, but the film contains some delightful random moments. The acquaintance between Lenora and the hitcher, for example, is hilarious and good for almost fifteen minutes of completely irrelevant padding. She picks up a mysterious guy, they promptly start bickering, she drops him off but gets her car in the mud, he helps her out, she drives off but comes back and they fall in love. It's truly hysterical. Beginning director Charles Band – who did a much better job with this than with the god awful "Parasite" – loses total grip on the film once passed the hour, with cheesy demonic creatures randomly running amok and excessive gore to compensate for the lack of coherence. The charismatic Robert Glaudini is sadly underused as the titular alchemist. A couple of more sequences with his evil appearance would definitely have made the film more horror-like and exciting.

In 1955, young waitress Lenora (Lucinda Dooling) finds herself inexplicably driving down the California highway to an unknown destination. This doesn't bode well for Cam (John Sanderford), the hitchhiker she just picked up, because he has to endure her somnambulist driving. The duo eventually end up at a graveside in the woods and meet Aaron (Robert Ginty), who is just as shocked to see them as Lenora appears to be the reincarnation of his wife who was murdered nearly 100 years earlier (and Aaron is still in his 30s). It takes quite a film to make me constantly scratch my head and say, "Wait? What the hell is going on here?" This Charles Band feature definitely gave my brain a workout with its bizarre storyline about reincarnation, demons and dimensional portals. The story itself is pretty innocuous and could be for kids, so it is surprising that Band throws in some very gory bits. Dooling is quite attractive as the lead and it is a shame she didn't go on to do more. The late Ginty is fine as usual. I do wonder if Band was slightly influenced by Richard Blackburn's LEMORA as this tends to ape the film's style and setting. Hell, even the leads have a similar name. As always, Richard Band supplies a fine score, one befitting a better movie perhaps.