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| Universal Pictures | Release Date: February 5, 1988 |
Starring:
Badja Djola, Bill Pullman, Brent Jennings, Cathy Tyson, Conrad Roberts, Michael Gough, Paul Guilfoyle, Paul Winfield, Theresa Merritt, Zakes Mokae
Summary:
An anthropologist goes to Haiti after hearing rumors about a drug used by black magic practitioners to turn people into zombies.
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The Serpent and the Rainbow does for the old Caribbean zombie movie what Steven Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" did for the serials. It preserves all the spooky fun of a movie like "White Zombie" while drawing upon all the sophisticated resources of big-budget modern film making: richly photographed authentic locales, wondrous special effects and amazingly acute sound recording...The result is an ambitious, entertaining--though not flawless--feat of the imagination, a highly visual and skillful blending of supernatural and political terror, high adventure and anthropology.
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Genuinely frightening...it's nice for a change to see some of the virtues of old-fashioned horror films—moody dream sequences, unsettling poetic images, and passages that suggest more than they show—rather than the usual splatter shocks and special effects (far from absent, but employed with relative economy).
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Mr. Craven's attempts at such effects are always gripping, but here they are sometimes overpowered by the complexity of the material. The search for the zombifying elixir, the influence of the Tontons Macoute, the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship and the mysterious powers of voodoo sometimes run together in a manner less provocative than confusing.
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All the silliest racist cliches are perpetrated: the dark people with their
dark magic; British actress Cathy Tyson, as a Haitian psychiatrist who is
occasionally possessed by demons and lapses into frenzied love-making;
evil third world politics hand-in-hand with black sorcery. [5 Feb 1988]
Jun 25, 2021
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