Zachary FenellSaturday Boners: Clive Barker's Lord of Illusions
January 31st 2009 17:57
Clive Barker's Lord of Illusions, 1995
Imagine, if you will, a universe where Scott Bakula is still cool and Kevin J. O'Connor plays a main serious character. Now imagine that Clive Barker has written the screenplay for this particular universe, and I think you can see where this train wreck starts.
In Lord of Illusions, Barker has demonstrated yet again that he cannot separate his sexuality from his work. Even if you didn't know that he's gay, you really start to get the message from this film, and more so from his books such as the Great and Secret Show. His ability to represent relationships between men and women has always been a bit dodgy, but his illustration of relationships between men alone really smacks of seriously needing a couples therapist.
Lord of Illusions sticks with his formula of starting a story in a seemingly unrelated event and then bringing more current events back to being affected by it. A series of weird murders ends up involving private investigator Harry D'Amour (Scott Bakula). These deaths culminate with the bizarre on-stage murder of magician Philip Swann (Kevin J. O'Connor), who is clearly very worried about some strange event from his past catching up with him.
Short of revealing too many plot points, I'll just cover what makes this movie bad. First, the BBC surely wishes it could manage production values this craptastic. Second, even if Clive Barker weren't outed already, watching the emotional play between the two main "antagonists" would make any homophobe reeeeeeeally uncomfortable. Third (as if you needed another point), the way the story unfolds is choppy, implausible, and kinda like watching a train wreck happen in slow motion and constant looping. If you read the Mission: Impossible review, you'll recall that part of pulling off a good twist at any point in a movie relies on giving the viewer something to work with, some kind of hint about the true nature of things. Lord of Illusions doesn't even attempt to do this, so you're just left with a series of scenes where you're pretty sure Barker was thinking, "Okay, I've messed 'em up pretty bad, now what can I do that'll be really screwed up...?"
I don't really see that it has any cult-classic potential, but I understand that a few hard-core fans of the Hellraiser series still appreciate this movie. I guess someone has to like it...
2 Stars
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