- Directed by John and Mark Polonia
- Written by Paul Alan
- Starring
- Vince Simmons
- Bob Dennis
- Bruce Hardy
I won this video from B-Movie Theater (used to be Salt City Video), who run a little contest in each of their weekly bulletins.
Now, I have to tell you, I’m a generous man. When rating movies on the IMDb, I’ve never begrudged anyone the base 1 point on the 1-to-10 scale; my philosophy has always been that anyone who actually completes a movie deserves the 1, if nothing more.
That philosophy has now changed. Bad Magic gets my first and only 0. By completing this movie, the Polonia brothers have left a net negative in the universe. The world is poorer for its existence. And if I didn’t already know and like Ron Bonk at Sub Rosa, I would wish him serious bodily harm for sending this to me. (As it is, I’ll still look for an opportunity to tie his shoelaces together.)
I mean, there’s bad, there’s bad, and there’s BAD. Bad just means it wasn’t what it should have been; bad means it’s easy to ridicule; and BAD means that there’s nothing to redeem it at all — not even little robot silhouettes in the lower right corner of the screen. The only enjoyment to be had from a movie this bad is the same as the only enjoyment garnered from some idiot cutting you off in traffic and almost killing you: The right to bitch and moan at length later. So that’s what I’m gonna do.
We begin with exposition, recited by “Renny,” a big black guy. Unfortunately, the character of Renny did not have the good fortune to be played by an actor. Instead, the role of Renny is filled by a big black guy with the charisma of a stump. His opening voice-over about voodoo and black magic is read (yes, you can actually hear the line breaks — he reads about as smoothly as a carriage return) with all the verve of someone reciting the drive-thru menu. His face, when we get to see it, hold a perpetually leaden expression that says, “Hey, this isn’t the Taco Bell.” The only time that this wooden demeanor is broken is in instances so sudden that you know the directors were off camera, saying “Smile now,” or “Now open your eyes really wide.”
The story? Oh yes. According to the voiceover, Renny’s brother Amos fell in with a vicious New York gang, the Red Claws, and got killed in a drug deal gone bad. Now Renny wants to get revenge via voodoo. I should point out that the NY location is established by frequent interludes of video footage shot on the streets of New York, accompanied by copious traffic sounds. The action, however, takes place in suburbia, bordering on rural America — tons of trees are always visible in the background. (I’m going to guess upstate New York.) The traffic sounds continue, however, to try to convince us that we’re still in the heart of the Big Apple; I guess that all locations just happen to back onto Central Park or something.
We’re next treated to Renny sitting around (in an office that looks like that of a guidance counselor — more on this later), reading an account of someone else using voodoo. Under his stumbling narration, we then see completely unrelated footage of two guys running around at night, being chased by a demon named “Carnage” (in other worlds, some schmoe in an off-the-shelf demon mask and a flannel shirt). Ooh. Spooky.
So Renny hops a plane to the West Indies to meet with Tobanga, a witch doctor his father knew. In cinematic terms, this means we see some cribbed stock footage of a plane taking off, followed by video footage of a place that certainly looks like the West Indies. Howerver, just as in the Big Apple footage, no characters are visible; my guess is that the directors (or someone they knew) had visited the West Indies and shot some camcorder footage, and they edited it in for verisimilitude. Or something.
Renny meets up with Tobanga in a nondescript room (there’s a card table, a potted plant, and a curtain covering one wall), and finds him to be a big fat bald black man dressed in a jungle print bedspread. Renny explains the (ahem) driving force behind his actions: “My soul screams one word – revenge.” (Imagine the teacher from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off saying that, and you’ll have it.) Tobanga sends him into a snakebite-induced trance, in which the Voodoo god Bl’kii Bl’kay (which I know I’ve misspelled, and who will be referred to hereafter as “BB”) will judge his worthiness to be trained in the dark arts. The trance is random footage of spooky stuff (including scenes from later on), plus a lot of swimming footage (?). Apparently BB approves, because then Tobanga teaches him all he needs to know — while sitting at the card table, in what seems like a single afternoon. (Oddly enough, the musical cue for this scene is unexpectedly cheery Caribbean music. La la la-la la, la-la la…)
His tutelage complete, Renny is given the new tools of his trade from a burlap sack. They are:
- A voodoo doll (a plain white rag doll, such as would be found at any craft store)
- The poison claws (a garden hand rake)
- The serum of astral projection (a small glass bottle, probably purchased at the same craft store)
- A spell to make the dead walk (a scroll made from a brown paper bag, rolled in a rubber band)
So Renny heads back to New York. To do the little ritual he needs to do, he has to photograph each of the Red Claws and offer them to BB. He has no trouble doing so, as there are only four of them. He follows them around town and takes surreptitious pictures (including one of them committing a casual murder.) Now, the fact that he could track each of them down and snap a picture without being seen says to me that he could have skipped the whole voodoo route and simply shot them. But gee, then the movie would have been over sooner. (As it was, it only clocked at one hour and seven minutes. No complaints here, though.)
By the way, not only are there only four Red Claws (a vicious and notorious gang, we’re supposed to believe), but they’re all white! So we’re supposed to believe that a gang of four white folks in New York is supposed to be enough of a temptation to the gangsta lifestyle to lure a previously-upstanding young African-American into a life of crime and, ultimately, his own demise. Right. Sure.
So. Renny ends up back in the guidance counselor officer (I mean, there’s even a No Smoking sign right beside the door!) with his black&white glossies. He does a little blood ritual, smoke appears from nowhere, and he sees — an evil Muppet! Yes, the evil and ominous BB is a snicker-inducing hand puppet. Remember those ugly little puppets from a couple of years ago, little foam rubber heads with three holes in the back for your fingers to manipulate the face? Somewhat less convincing than that. BB promises that they will meet again when Renny’s revenge is complete.
So first, the girl of the Claws. And I have never seen a worse wig — I kept expecting to see the broom handle hanging down her back. At first, I thought it was a guy in drag, but no, it’s a real woman, just with unreal hair. She’s turning a trick (with Claws leader Ajax standing outside her window), when Renny starts punching through the voodoo doll with straight pins. In pain, she kicks her john out and writhes in pain; when Ajax bursts in to see what the trouble is, Renny squeezes the doll’s head, and the girl’s head explodes (all over Ajax’s face).
On the director’s cue, Renny laughs maniacally. (Actually, it’s more the laugh appropriate to when Bugs Bunny gives Elmer Fudd a big wet kiss. But at least it’s laughter, right?) Ajax runs out into the night.
Renny has a little nap and dreams some completely unrelated Satanic imagery. He wakes up and washes his face in the school bathroom. (It’s a school bathroom! It’s got the cheap paper towel roll dispensers and mosaic tile halfway up the walls, for crying out loud! What is Renny, a guidance counselor? Truant officer?)
Now it’s broad daylight, and Ajax is STILL running (take the bus, stupid!), finally ending up at the house of the two other Red Claws. If these guys seemed unimposing now, they seem freakishly inept now; one of the two is a big fat guy with glasses, the other is in his late thirties and bears an uncanny resemblance to John Byner. Not exactly the inner city bad-ass mofos their press agent makes them out to be.
After some incredibly ludicrous dialog, they determine that the best plan is to hang around and wait to be killed. (Well, that’s not their exact words — they just said something about lying low.) Ajax tries to have a nap; Byner-clone and Fatty play cards until Byner gets up to go to the bathroom. Fatty takes the occasion to go out for some cigs; Ajax wakes up and, needing help to sleep, grabs a quarter-full bottle of medicine from the fridge and drains it. (Clearly visible on the side are the words “pediatric susp.”, which means a) that one of the Red Claws is a responsible parent, and b) that the sum total of the medicine Ajax downed was probably equal to one and a half Tylenols.)
While Ajax is asleep and Byner is still on the can (sitting on the toilet with his pants up — no wonder nothing’s moving), Renny takes the serum of astral projection and appears in the bathroom as a ghostly presence. When he claps, the toilet paper unrolls itself, and — NO!! — wraps itself around the panicking Byner. Unable to free himself from the surprising strength (yet soothing smoothness) of his 2-ply tissue, Byner is helpless when the kitchen knives fly in in a very hokey fashion and stab him to death.
Fatty gets back with the cigarettes and turns on the TV. He sits there, chuckling to footage recycled from The Woodchipper Massacre (another product of the same directors’ font of creativity) until Renny gets out — the hand rake! As he rakes it across Fatty’s picture, wounds mysteriously appear all over Farry’s face! He cries out, but naturally Ajax is sleeping like a baby (hee hee hee).
When Ajax finally wakes up, his face is splashed with Fatty’s blood. He panics and runs about eight blocks before finding someone’s unattended car. He drives until nightfall, oddly enough, in the direction of the cemetery in which Amos is buried. Somehow Renny takes control of his car and causes it to crash (very vaguely, of course — like they had the budget to dent a car!) Ajax stumbles out of the car and drops to the ground, unconscious.
Renny, laughing at the wascally wabbit, removes the rubber band from the brown paper scroll with an ominous snap and begins to read…
And whaddaya know, Amos rises from the grave! Of course, he bears no resemblance to the photos we’ve seen, largely because he’s wearing yet another piss-poor off-the-shelf Halloween mask. (He’s also wearing tennies. I hear that, in New York state, you get buried in your gym shoes unless you stipulate against it in your will.)
Ajax wakes up, and there’s a plodding chase. I mean, Amos is a zombie; all he can do is shuffle. And Ajax somehow injured his leg in the crash, though he can’t seem to remember which leg it was. So Ajax runs… clump… clump… clump… and Amos follows… clump… clump… clump… (“Amos and Ajax”? Sounds like a match made in — never mind.)
Amos traps Ajax in an outbuilding and pulls out his heart. He then stumbles outside and evaporates into smoke.
Renny exults (“Yay, team”) but then he suddenly — fades away! He finds himself in Hell (which looks suspiciously like the Tobanga set, but with the light turned down), where BB the Evil Muppet and Tobanga tell him — surprise! — the price of revenge is your soul! Bwah ha hah!
The end.
There is much to be said about the current micro-budget revolution. However, the worst downside is that any schmuck with absolutely no talent (or, in this case, any two schmuck brothers with no talent between them) can round up their no-talent friends and make a movie with absolutely nothing to recommend it. And worse, instead of having an appropriate video cover (done in magic marker on lined paper, say), PhotoShop has made it possible for anyone to design a cover which fails to reveal the absolutely abysmal quality within.
Ron Bonk, if I were you, I’d start wearing penny loafers. Because “My soul screams one word – revenge.”
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 7
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 0
- dream sequences: 2
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: yeah, right
