• Written and directed by Kevin VanHook
• Starring
  • Eric Mabius
  • Charisma Carpenter
  • Rik Young
  • Jeffrey Combs
  • Jayne Heitmeyer
• Produced by Karen Bailey and Kevin VanHook

Unlike a lot of the movies I review around here, this one really should have been good. The concept is certainly enough to justify that assumption: twenty years ago, demonic possession caused half of a small Tennessee town to slaughter the other half; the only two survivors were a young brother and sister. The brother has spent his life since then learning how to fight the devil through study of global religions and occult traditions, and has tracked and fought Satan in many places around the world (or North America, at any rate). Now, for the final battle, he reunites with his sister who’s been trying to lead a normal life, and assembles a diverse support team of people whose lives he’s saved while battling the forces of darkness, and together they confront the Adversary at the ruins of the Tennessee town.

On paper, it’s got a lot going for it: You’ve got a cosmic good vs. evil thing going on (always tempting, though often hard to pull off), and a driven hero whose evil-fighting powers set him apart from the rest of humanity (which is always a valid excuse to wear a bad black leather trenchcoat). Plus, half the story is “gathering the team,” which has always been a dependable plot structure, from Shichinin no Samurai (1954) and The Magnificent Seven (1960) through Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and The Bad Pack (1998). Odds are against it being High Art, but it’s still a concept with a reasonable expectation of turning out some engaging entertainment.

Which means that the rest of this review will document all the ways in which the finished movie resolutely turns away from its best chances of success.

Trying to court the conservative Christian demographic, the latest edition of Mortal Kombat includes a “Bible vs. Zombie” combination.

1) Our Hero, Cole (Eric Mabius). As mentioned, being one of the only survivors of a satanic massacre is a pretty good justification for the black-leather-trenchcoat thing. But cole goes beyond: He’s got the black rockstar hair, a world-weary espression, consistently dark clothing, and of course a scar that angles from his right eyebrow down across his right cheek. He may be our last defense against the forces of darkness, but he looks like that moody teenager from your high school who always wanted people to say how much he looked like Brandon Lee.

2) The Special Effects. Our first scene shows Cole in Haiti, tracking his dark quarry amidst the voodoo dens at night. (Note: Despite the title, this is the only appearance of voodoo in the movie.) He uses a shell-encrusted magical fetish to start a CGI fire to blow up an oil tank, then turns and uses a lightning-generating Holy Bible to fry a voodoo zombie, all while shouting bits of Latin. Shout all you want, Cole; it won’t distract us from seeing that the CGI work looks like something out of a videogame. And worse than cheap, it’s both cheap and excessive; the oil tank explosion means nothing to us, and the zombie zap looks more like somebody showing off their special-effects program package than a necessary element of the scene. As the movie goes on, we see computer-created tentacles, weaponry, and flight effects. Very little of it is convincing, and even less really contributes to the storytelling. Just because you CAN shoot a scene against a greenscreen doesn’t mean you SHOULD.

Pop quiz: On this road trip, which one packed conditioner?

3) Cole’s Sister Heather (Charisma Carpenter). Cole and Heather have been separated for years; while he’s been off chasing a demon, she’s been in New Orleans, gaining a reputation as an artist. Not an entirely normal artist, of course; she often feels compelled to draw events that come true in the future — deaths, train crashes, the fall television premieres, and other calamities — but not in enough detail to head off any disasters. When Cole shows up and drags Heather off to fight the evil that he’s got to face back in their hometown of Maryfield — for reasons that are not made clear — she acts more like he’s shown up to inconvenience her by sleeping on the couch instead of disrupting her life. Mabius and Carpenter do a serviceable job of projecting a brother/sister vibe, but it’s not the right vibe for siblings who share a traumatic past but have chosen different paths in life. The most conflict we get from them resolves itself with Cole declaring things like, “I can’t do this alone,” and Heather replying, “I know.”

4) Heather, Part Two. We expect Cole to be all mysterious and internalized. That’s the way brooding demon hunters are. But Heather remains almost as much of a cipher. We get barely an inkling of their childhood together, or what drew them to divergent paths. (The one scene that even attempts to throw some light on their past and relationship got cut, and ended up in the deleted scenes. And even then, it wasn’t much. But considering some of the scenes that were kept in, one wonders at the logic.) Given how much Mabius looks like the stereotypical mystic-hero, and how much Carpenter looks like the girl trying to “do normal,” I have this fantasy that in some parallel universe, their roles were reversed: Carpenter plays the tortured hero on the edge of shadow, and Mabius the artistic soul longing for the mainstream.

“But that’s when Cole showed up, like something out of a movie.” (Direct quote.)

5 Excuse Me, But Is This Scene Part Of The Story? I mentioned scenes which should have been included, tossed into the deleted-scenes bin. What makes that even less explicable is the character of some of the scenes that were left in — including the one directly following the deleted one mentioned above. It even REFERENCES the conversation held therein, which audiences are now not privy to. Instead, this scene involves Heather stopping at a New Orleans graveyard to pay her respects to their aunt before leaving, and Cole wandering among the crypts until he catches sight of a spooky little girl who can disappear in and out of the rows of crypts with ease; in fact, it ends up looking like one of those Looney Tunes shticks with the impossibly-connected doors. And does anything come of this scene? No. Apparently, when Cole and Heather drive off, it turns out that the little girl, quite corporeal, has killed the caretaker. Which means absolutely nothing to the plot. (But since the caretaker was played by the director, I guess we can figure out why it made the cut.)

I use this scene as an example, but the trend runs through the movie: scenes included because they may have some slight coolness value, but which distract and detract from the impetus of the main narrative. As a subset thereof:

5a) Backstories, Anyone? Cole’s and Heather’s lives remain closed to us, but the pasts of some of the supporting characters, former associates of Cole’s who heed his psychic call for help, are explained to us in exhausting detail. The prime example of this is Frank Taggert (Jeffrey Combs), a former cop whose history with Cole he explains a length to his significant other as he packs to leave. Thanks to flashbacks, we get the whole story of how Taggert and his partner had investigated a disturbance at a church which involved a reanimated priest and a human sacrifice and Frank’s partner getting possessed and yada yada yada. It’s an awfully long detour to take to end up with, “And that’s why I have to go now, honey.” It’s especially long when Frank then gets killed by a possessed person before he even joins up with Cole. Combs is too good a performer to waste, though, which is why Frank apparently reanimates through sheer force of will (!!!) and completes his journey to Maryfield, neck broken and flies buzzing around him. But even that is rendered pointless when Frank really doesn’t contribute anything special once he gets there — i.e., more than the living posse members.

“Brains! Braaaaiiins! Always wanted to say that…”

In contrast, John Amos plays biker ex-con Dutch, who contributes more to the plot than Frank Taggert. Yet no clue of his backstory with Cole is given. I suppose I should be thankful that not every member of the half-dozen friends who shows up to aid Cole gets his own ten-minute flashback, but the choice of whose history gets shown and whose is forgotten seems completely arbitrary.

6) Then Again, What WAS The Main Story? The sole redeeming feature of the tangents and divergences is that they just might distract us from realizing that the main story really isn’t much. Cole and Heather have to come back to Maryfield to confront the devil, because, um…. Cole wants the help of these friends, even though they met when Cole first pulled their helpless asses out of a crack, because, um…. And their plan, once they reach Maryfield, is to hole up in a bed-and-breakfast (run by Dee Wallace) and, um…. (I think the correct answer to that last one is, “Wait for Satan to show up and hand their asses to them again.”) And Cole thinks he can vanquish the Priest of Darkness this time, even though their previous meetings all ended in a draw, because, um….

7) Giving The Devil His Due. I’ve been operating on the assumption that the infernal being here (Rik Young), who identifies himself innocuously as “Daniel,” is indeed THE Devil, not just A Devil. He is of course polished and handsome, well-mannered and slightly olive-skinned, and he talks about how long he’s been doing this and such, and Cole mentions how he’s found traces of his adversary in all the world religions. While he’s never explicitly identified as Lucifer, Ol’ Scratch himself, one would think that there would have been some throwaway exposition of the identity of this demonic but non-ultimate evil being. But if this is indeed Beelzebub himself, then the implications of the ending are staggering: Do they actually kill the devil himself? How, exactly, is the world going to change if the Prince of Lies has given up the ghost? There are global theological implications here that go beyond the “I’m gonna git him for slaughtering my home town” motivation. (I probably should have labeled this paragraph with a spoiler warning, huh? Too bad.)

Devil Daniel and his Satanic Potatoes!

8) When In Doubt, Steal. Borrowing and “homaging” are to be expected in cinema, but there are times when it’s blatant enough to be called “stealing.” I’m thinking specifically of a scene in which the charismatic Satan sits in the fork of a tree, then jumps down, exploding into a murder of crows before hitting the ground. It’s an arresting image — and it was even better when I saw it first in The Prophecy (1995), with a younger Viggo Mortensen playing Lucifer. (And that was a movie which didn’t need PS3-level digital effects to gussy up a theological thriller, either.)

I hope no one thinks I’m a slacker for not polishing off an even ten points (or even worse, a dozen). I think I’ve illustrated well enough that, even with a kick-ass concept, Voodoo Moon still manages to be too unfocused to be powerful, or even moderately engaging.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 15
• breasts: 8
• explosions: 1
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
  • Jeffrey Combs (Frank Taggert) is a Star Trek mainstay, playing recurring characters “Weyoun” and “Brunt” on DS9, plus “Detective Mulcahey” in the episode “Far Beyond the Stars”; “Penk” on the Voyager episode “Tsunkatse”; and the recurring character “Commander Shran” on Enterprise
  • Rey Gallegos (”Ray,” one of Cole’s friends) played “N.D. Crewman” on the Enterprise episode “Strange New World”
  • Frank Collison (”Mac”) played “Gul Dolak” in the TNG episode “Ensign Ro”