Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #252 Cast a Deadly Spell (1991)
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As a lonely, friendless, maladjusted, pop-culture obsessed child and adolescent I lived for television but what REALLY made my heart sing and raging hormone surge even further out of control was not TV but HBO.
To my fourteen and fifteen year old soul, HBO was everything. It had documentaries and original programming of substance and ambition as well as all the gratuitous nudity a frenzied masturbator could ask for.
I loved HBO above all other channels because it was the home to my beloved Tales From the Crypt, a quintessentially HBO combination of classy and trashy, prestigious and unrelentingly, unapologetically sleazy.
I vividly remember watching promos for the 1991 HBO television movie Cast a Deadly Spell and getting genuinely excited by its cross-pollination of the hard-boiled detective and horror genres, its unique combination of Raymond Chandler and H.P Lovecraft.
This might seem a little strange. Who gets excited about a television movie? But HBO was different and much of what I found intriguing about Cast a Deadly Spell was that it looked so much like Tales From the Crypt.
I was not wrong. Cast a Deadly Spell did indeed distinguish itself with creatures, make-up and practical effects on par with Tales From the Crypt in its gory heyday. There aren’t a huge number of monsters in Cast a Deadly Spell but they all matter.
This might have a big budget for an HBO movie but it has an HBO movie budget all the same. Yet each of the monsters introduced in Cast a Deadly Spell has been fully realized on every level and serves a worthwhile purpose.
Director Martin Campbell would go on to helm the wildly entertaining The Mask of Zorro and 2006’s Casino Royale, widely considered the best James Bond movie ever made. So the man knows how to stage a scene and tell a story.
Then again, Campbell also directed the 2011 Green Lantern, which has infinitely worse creatures and creature effects than Cast a Deadly Spell despite the notorious comic book flop coming out two decades later, having CGI and costing roughly forty times as much as the six million dollar cult television movie.
It would be more accurate to say that Cast a Deadly Spell is an infinitely more satisfying spectacle precisely because it was made twenty years earlier and didn’t have an insanely bloated tentpole budget and/or appalling CGI.
There’s something wonderfully homemade and organic about the monsters in Cast a Deadly Spell. The gargoyles, werewolves, gremlins and evil cosmic entities beyond the power of human imagination here are all clearly the product of blood and sweat and rubber and old-school craftsmanship rather than a series of zeros and ones floating around in a computer program somewhere.
In what might in fact be what is known as an “homage” to its primary inspiration, a perfectly cast Fred Ward stars as wisecracking, seen-it-all shamus Harry Philip Lovecraft, seemingly the only detective in 1948 Los Angeles who does not use magic as part of his everyday life.
Gumshoes aren’t the only folks dabbling in the dark arts in this alternate universe version of late 1940s Los Angeles. EVERYBODY uses magic to make their lives easier, from mobsters to file clerks.
A lesser movie would feel the need to highlight and underline every use of magic, to really foreground the fantastical nature of the film’s universe. Cast a Deadly Spell has enough respect for its audience’s intelligence and attention span to let much of the magic happen mischievously in the background, without either calling attention to it or wasting our time by explaining what ultimately does not need to be explained.
Lovecraft wanders into a tricky situation with potentially apocalyptic ramifications when he’s hired by sinister Amos Hackshaw (David Warner) to find a Necronomicon he claims has been stolen by a chauffeur.
Lovecraft’s search for the book of infinite dark power leads him back into the lives of his old partner Harry Bordon (Clancy Brown), who has become a successful, albeit shady businessman since they both left the police force, and old flame Connie Stone (Julianne Moore).
When she made Cast a Deadly Spell Moore had not yet ascended to the pinnacle of film acting. She was a soap opera veteran whose only notable screen credit was Tales From the Darkside: The Movie but her electrifying turn here illustrated that even in an HBO production she was nothing less than a goddamn movie star.
Moore is a figure of infinite glamour, danger and sexuality, equal parts Jessica Rabbit, Rita Hayworth in Gilda and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys. She’s not just beautiful: she’s a sex bomb, hypnotic in her ripe sensuality.
Moore has never looked better but then everything in Cast a Deadly Spell is absolutely sumptuous: the art deco production design, the tuxedos worn by men and evening clothes worn by women and Alexander Gruszynski’s gorgeous cinematography.
Cast a Deadly Spell cares enough to get the details exactly right for both Neo-Noir and Lovecraftian horror. It’s an ingenious hybrid that does justice to both sides of the equation, that’s a riotous creature as well as a crackling detective yarn.
I had no idea how Cast a Deadly Spell would hold up in the cold light on 2021. I am pleased to report that it’s every bit as creative and satisfying and gorgeously realized as I remember with one VERY notable exception.
For reason I cannot begin to fathom, beyond it being made in 1991, before the concept of cultural sensitivity was invented, Cast a Deadly Spell features a scene where H.P Lovecraft, THE HERO OF THIS STORY calls a cross-dresser not one but two homophobic slurs that begin with F in rapid succession.
My heart sunk during these awful moments. They’re just so goddamn unnecessary. They serve no point whatsoever so while I very much recommend Cast a Deadly Spell, which is currently available on HBO Max, it is with the caveat that it unfortunately contains ten seconds of inexplicable homophobic ugliness best left on the cutting room floor.
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