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Julian Sands stars as a stylish male witch (hence the title) who makes his way from Boston of 1691 into the present time to recover pieces of a book which will spell out the name of God and undo all creation (Kevin Smith would rip this off years later in Dogma). The only people who can stop him are Giles Redferne (Richard Grant), a witch-hunter from the same time period, and Kassandra (Lori Singer, twin sister of Beastmaster's Marc Singer), a Californian Valley grrrl whom the warlock has cursed with accelerated aging. Redferne employs a variety of witch hexes against the warlock, including salt, nails in his footprints, and an iron weathervane he can apparently hurl fifty feet into the air without so much as breaking a sweat. The warlock's powers, for the most part, consist of levitation and flight (after drinking the fat of an unbaptized child), and spewing orange flames from his hands. A secondary power would be his European-style black suit, which was enough to give me the shudders.
Though the film aspires to be a horror flick, the closest it comes is when the warlock communes with Satan Himself, resplendent in pale makeup with an overbite, and even that looked a little hokey by today's standards (Raimi did a better job years earlier in Evil Dead, but that's a film I've been harping on for too long, so I'll shut up about it). Instead of labeling this as horror, the producers would have been better off calling it an action/adventure movie of sorts. Grant, in his witch-hunting guise, could be a bad parody of Wesley Snipes in Blade or Arnold Schwartzenegger in Terminator II. He's tough, he's bad, he's strong, and he's even got a personal vendetta: the warlock killed his wife some years ago, it seems. Great motivations for a superstar. Now if only they could get his early New England accent to sound less like a bad Groundskeeper Willie impression. Singer has a tough job "acting" like a rapidly-aging woman, but truth to tell, she looks better at forty than she does at twenty, which makes sense since she would have been thirty-two when the movie was released. Her efforts towards acting "elderly," however, don't attempt anything beyond lowering her voice and affecting a slight limp. Watch carefully as the supposedly sixty-year-old woman hobbles after a train, doing a pace I don't think even most forty-year-olds I know could keep up. It's the only part worth watching carefully, and not because of any cinematic merit, either.
--Long
Copyright 2002 Tso Long Productions ©