I’ve always been drawn to the
horror noir subgenre – a hybrid of horror and film noir that features
downtrodden protagonists immersed in a nightmarish, shadowy underworld fraught
with danger at every turn. However, instead of the antagonists being simple
criminal underworld figures they are quite often beings infused with
supernatural powers. Some memorable examples include Angel Heart (1987), The Ninth
Gate (1999) and Constantine (2005).
One of my favorites is Lord of Illusions
(1995), an adaptation of Clive Barker’s short story, “The Last Illusion” by the
author himself. The protagonist in both is Harry D’Amour, a private
investigator and occult detective that has appeared in several of Barker’s
fiction, most notably, albeit briefly, in The
Great and Secret Show, a short story entitled “The Lost Souls, and also the
novel Everville.
Lord of Illusions starts almost as if we’ve arrived late for
another film, right in the midst of its exciting, action-packed climax. Two
vehicles arrive at a rundown compound out in the Mojave Desert circa 1982.
Inside the house resides Nix (Daniel von Bargen), a powerful magician and
leader of a small cult of dedicated followers. Barker gives us a little taste
of the man’s powers by showing him casually juggling a small ball of fire while
talking to his people about cleansing the world. An illusionist by the name of
Philip Swann (Kevin J. O’Connor) and a small group of ex-followers emerge from
the vehicles intent on stopping Nix who has kidnapped a child, keeping her tied
up in the bowels of the house with a pet mandrill.
Nix’s house looks like the
result of years of neglect with its walls littered with graffiti and gaping
holes exposing the infrastructure all the while bathed in atmospheric shadows. The
exterior is even worse, the ground littered with the carcasses of dead animals,
abandoned toys and other assorted garbage. Swann confronts Nix who proceeds to
penetrate the illusionist’s mind, twisting his perception so that his friends
look like grotesque aberrations. Despite this, they still manage to get the
upper hand on the cult leader. Swann binds Nix’s eyes and mouth through magical
means and buries his body out in the desert. However, his creepy assistant
Butterfield (Barry Del Sherman) escapes.
It’s 13 years later and we
meet private detective Harry D’Amour in New York City, fresh from an exorcism
case in Brooklyn. It’s left him burnt out and edgy and so a friend of his gives
him another job as a form of vacation – a standard insurance fraud case in Los Angeles.
Barker makes sure to contrast the drab, rainy New York with sun-kissed L.A.
full of palm trees and beaches. The case seems pretty straight-forward until
Harry follows his subject to a fortune teller only to see him quickly run out.
Harry investigates and comes across a grisly sight – the fortune teller (Joseph
Latimore) has been used as a human pincushion by Butterfield. It turns out that
he has been tracking down everyone who helped Swann defeat Nix on that fateful
day 13 years ago.
Swann has since gone on to
become a popular illusionist in the vein of David Copperfield. His wife
Dorothea (Famke Janssen) sees Harry in the local newspaper and hires him to
help Swann who she thinks is in danger. Intrigued by Swann and dazzled by
Dorothea’s beauty, Harry agrees to take on the case and comes to see the
illusionist perform one night where he unveils a new act that goes horribly
wrong. The resulting fallout sees Harry and Dorothea try to thwart
Butterfield’s plans to resurrect Nix.
I’ve always been fascinated
by illusionists and magicians. I like how Lord
of Illusions makes a point of explaining the difference as Swann’s
assistant Valentin (Joel Swetow) tells Harry, “Illusions are trickery.
Magicians do it for real.” Barker’s film goes to great lengths to show the
difference between showy, Las Vegas-style theatrics and true magic – in the
case of Nix, the darkest kind. This all dovetails rather nice into the horror
noir subgenre as Barker mixes and matches from both so that we have the
world-weary private detective butting heads with a magic-practicing cult
leader. There’s the murder mystery merging with a supernatural evil threatening
to take over the world.
What I find intriguing about Lord of Illusions is how it follows
Harry’s journey from the hard-boiled detective world, mixed with dabblings in
the occult, to full-on immersion in the world of illusions, which is typified
by one of my favorite scenes where he visits the famous Magic Castle in
Hollywood, a nightclub for magicians and magic aficionados. The establishing
shot features the iconic building while “Magic Moments” plays cheekily over the
soundtrack. Harry saunters in and bellies up to the bar next to an older
gentleman (played by none other than famous magician Billy McComb) practicing
card tricks, which prompts the bemused private eye to ask him, “Where did you
learn that?” to which he replies with a smile, “Oh, this? At birth.” He takes
Harry on a brief tour and offers a glimpse of the inner workings. Later on,
Harry audaciously breaks in with the help of another magician.
With the exception of Quantum Leap, I was never a huge fan of
Scott Bakula, but he is quite good as the burnt-out private investigator with
his share of emotional baggage – a prior case that Barker alludes to in brief
flashbacks and fragmented nightmares. Like in many detective stories, Harry
takes on a case that immerses him in a strange world he knows little of, but
becomes acquainted with the deeper into it he delves. Bakula has just enough of
an everyman quality to act as the audience surrogate, our gateway into this
fantastical world that Barker has created.
Famke Janssen plays Dorothea
as a noirish fatale full of secrets, but not ones normally associated with the
genre; rather ones that adhere to horror. She’s a striking beauty and Barker
makes sure we know it through a series of revealing outfits that show off her
gorgeous figure. Sadly she isn’t given much to do except look great and be the
film’s damsel in distress until the film’s final moments. The romance that
develops between Harry and Dorothea feels a little rushed, even in the longer
director’s cut. The two actors certainly have decent chemistry together, but I
don’t buy their jumping into bed so quickly. Janssen made Lord of Illusions at the height of her mainstream popularity (it
came out after the James Bond film GoldenEye)
and I always wonder if its rather lackluster box office receipts (in comparison
to the Bond film) was the reason why she downshifted to B and independent films
until X-Men in 2000.
Barker casts Kevin J. O’Connor
and Daniel von Bargen wonderfully against type as a jaded illusionist and an
evil cult leader respectively. O’Connor certainly has played all kind of roles
in all kinds of films as varied as Steel
Magnolias (1989) and The Mummy
(1999), but I would have never thought to cast him as a brilliant illusionist.
Conversely, von Bargen is often cast as douchey authority figures (see Super Troopers and Seinfeld), but in Barker’s film he’s called upon to play an
incarnation of evil magic and is quite convincing as a deranged cult leader –
imagine if Charles Manson practiced magic. Barry Del Sherman is quite memorable
as Butterfield, an androgynous sadist that talks a little like John Malkovich
and dresses like a stereotypical rock star. The actor has an unusual and
captivating presence whenever he’s on-screen.
The impetus for making Lord of Illusions came from the fact
that Clive Barker hadn’t seen a good scary movie in awhile and this had “truly
gotten under my skin,” as he said in an interview. He felt that the world of
magic would be a fertile arena for a horror film because, “People have eerie
feelings about magic, illusion. And despite the wholesome image of Mr. David
Copperfield, illusion is a fruitful area of a horror movie to begin in.” Barker
liked magic and had affection for the character of Harry D’Amour, who appeared
in several of the author’s books. According to the author, Harry was not “a Van
Helsing, defiantly facing off against some implacable evil with faith and holy
water. His antecedents are the troubled, weary and often lovelorn heroes of
film noir.” He felt that films like Hellraiser
(1987), which were dominated by their antagonists, had run their course and
decided that if he was going to make another series of films it would focus on
a hero.
That being said, Barker still
wanted the film to have an interesting antagonist, but one that was identifiable
to audiences: “Nix is a villain I think we can relate to; he’s not unlike
Charles Manson … The craziness of Waco, the craziness of Jonestown, the Manson
stuff – Nix is the embodiment of the charismatic leader who says, ‘Follow me to
death,’ which is something that’s part of our culture.”
It had been several years
since his last film, Nightbreed (1990),
which he had a horrible experience on in terms of dealing with the studio, but
decided to try again because of Lord of
Illusions was “a modestly scaled project, which gave me the security of not
being micromanaged.” Barker went to work on the screenplay as early as August
1991. The budget for Lord of Illusions was a lean $11 million with a short
shooting schedule. Barker wanted his film to look double what it cost to make
so he storyboarded the entire thing in order to be prepared every day.
When Scott Bakula first met
with Barker, the filmmaker told him that Lord
of Illusions was influenced by films like The Exorcist (1971) and Chinatown
(1974). When filming began, the author was impressed by how much the actor
embodied the character he had created: “When he stepped on set, in costume for
the first time … I thought, ‘This is wonderful – this is the man I’ve been
writing about for 8 years.” Barker has subsequently said that whenever he
writes about the character he imagines Bakula.
Barker had no problem casting
Bakula as Harry D’Amour, but United Artists balked when he wanted Famke Janssen
as Dorothea. The producers saw approximately 40 actresses and were looking for
an unknown because of their limited budget. They liked Janssen for the haunted
look on her face. She got her start as a model and had only done a few small
roles on television shows like Star Trek:
The Next Generation and Melrose Place.
Barker did a screen test with her and the studio allowed him to cast the
actress in the film. Barker’s instincts were validated when, a few weeks into
filming, she was cast a Bond girl in the next James Bond film, GoldenEye.
The first test screening for Lord of Illusions did not go well with
the audience balking at the explicit nature of the sex depicted in the film.
They also complained that the running time was too long and that there was too
much talking. Barker cut out a few scenes and toned down the sex and the second
screening went much better: “They said it was the scariest movie they’d ever
seen,” he recalled in an interview. After this screening, Barker toned down
some of the violence.
Predictably, Lord of Illusions received mostly mixed
to negative reviews from mainstream critics. However, Roger Ebert gave it three
out of four stars and wrote, “What I liked – enough to make me recommend the
movie – wasn’t so much the conclusion as the buildup, with D’Amour developing a
curious relationship with Dorothea and Valentin, and penetrating into the inner
circles of black magic.” In his review for The
New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, “the gore quickly becomes as tiresome
as the overheated dialogue in which the characters blather on about the
difference between ‘divinity and trickery’.” USA Today gave the film two-and-a-half out of four stars and Mike
Clark wrote, “Barker’s visual side dominates its literary equivalent this time
out, resulting in a time-killer that may amuse fans until illusion is shattered
by the rolling of the end credits.” Entertainment
Weekly gave it a “D-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman found it to be “turgid
cop-thriller nonsense.” Along with Ebert, the Los Angeles Times’ Kevin Thomas provided one of the rare positive
reviews: “Lord of Illusions belongs
to Bakula, but he gets staunch support on both sides of the camera.” Finally,
in his review for the Washington Post,
Richard Harrington felt that Barker was “torn between his great gifts as an
author and his aspirations as a moviemaker. Until he figures out how to finesse
a convincing transition, Barker is doomed to creative purgatory.”
The title card at the
beginning of Lord of Illusions states
that death is only an illusion and in the film’s world of magical madmen this
is certainly true as both Nix and Swann dabble with this concept. Barker’s film
plays with our perception of what is real and what isn’t. After all, what’s a
film, but just another illusion? He has certainly improved as a filmmaker with Lord of Illusions. It looks better and
tells a more coherent story than his previous effort, Nightbreed, which was marred by studio interference. His direction
in this film is more confident and he gets good performances out of his cast,
especially Kevin J. O’Connor and Daniel von Bargen, while his script
unfortunately shortchanges Famke Janssen. It’s a shame that Lord of Illusions wasn’t more of a
commercial success as it could have been the start of many Harry D’Amour films,
but alas it wasn’t meant to be, but at least we have this cinematic incarnation
and the character continues to live on in Barker’s fiction.
SOURCES
“Bakula Makes Quantum Leap
from TV to Films.” Reuters News Agency. September 23, 1995.
Barker, Clive. Lord of Illusions Laser Disc Liner
Notes. 1996.
Beeler, Michael. “Lord of Illusions – Filming the Books of
Blood.” Cinefantastique. April 1995.
Ferrante, Anthony C. “The
Conjuring of Lord of Illusions Part 5
– The Last Interview.” Fangoria. September 1995.
Lamanna, Dan. “Clive Barker’s
Lurid Fascination.” Cinescape. January 1995.
Macklin, William R. “Horrors!
Clive Barker Thinks that Getting His Twisted Tales Out in the Open is
Therapeutic.” Philadelphia Inquirer. August 24, 1995.
Rya, James. “Ex-Model Janssen
Updates ‘Bond Girl’ Image.” BPI Entertainment News Wire. November 3,
1995.
Spelling, Ian. “Barker is
Back.” The New York Times. August 22, 1995.
Stroby, W.C. “Boundless
Imagination.” Fangoria. January 1992.
“The Making of Lord of Illusions” Sci-Fi Channel
documentary. Lord of Illusions Laser
Disc. 1996.
