Review: Spellcaster (1992)
Directed by: Rafal Zielinski
Starring: Adam Ant, Richard Blade, Gail O'Grady
Written by: Dennis Paoli
Music by: Nathan Wang
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray (Vinegar Syndrome)
IMDb
Spellcaster is obviously trying to do for Adam Ant what 1986’s Labyrinth did for David Bowie, but there are a few problems with that: Way fewer people know who the hell Adam Ant is, he’s only in this movie for 10 minutes, and when he’s in it, he’s not wearing penis-emphasizing tights and singing whimsical tunes like “Magic Dance.” This flick “stars” Ant as a Willy Wonka-esque character, who’s hosting a contest via an MTV-like media entity in which a handful of people stay at his Italian castle for a weekend as they search for a $1 million check. Soon enough, the group — which includes a teen brother and sister, a slobby eats-a-lot dude, a French girl who loves to flirt, a woman in fancy hunting gear, and blonde American woman who loves to flirt — start dying one by one at the hands of a variety of monsters.
The Italian castle where Ant’s Diablo (pronounced at least a couple of different ways by cast members who probably didn’t give a shit) lives is the same owned by producer Charles Band, where many Empire/Full Moon movies were filmed during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. As usual, it serves as a fairly impressive setting that belies how cheap the overall production values are. Director Rafal Zielinski primarily worked on sex comedies like Screwballs (1983) and its sequels, and he’s out of his element here, where there’s nothing sexy and nothing funny. Everything about this flick is very ‘80s, which makes sense since production started in 1986. But when Band’s Empire Pictures went kaput in 1988, the movie was left without a distribution home until the early ‘90s, when no one cared about Adam Ant anymore and MTV began moving away from actual music.
So what we’ve got here is a lot of nothing happening, some random music video clips, a loud British VJ, an inebriated pop star (played by the girl from the A-Ha video), some PG-13 pseudo-kink, the occasional fun monster (designed by the great John Carl Buechler), and a lot of interchangeable blonde ladies. There’s a shower scene in which the random American blonde seduces the teen brother, and I was really confused the whole time because I thought the woman was his sister, randy for some incest. Even with a few different accents floating around, it took me about 75 minutes to work out which blonde was which and by then, most of them were dead. Every once in a while, Adam Ant’s hands show up on screen to swirl around a crystal ball and conjure some sort of supernatural danger.
I can see Spellcaster appealing to people who were ‘tweens in the late ‘80s, but not to many others. Critic Eric Snider has referred to this as an attempted "MTV generation cult favorite,” and yes, it’s definitely halfheartedly meandering toward that but it gets bored by itself well before reaching the destination. The recognizably imaginative Buechlerian creatures and the setting nearly make the movie worth watching, but everything else too much of a chore to recommend this in good faith.
Overall rating: 3.5 out of 10
