31 Days of Horror: Scream & Shout! Day 19

Lord of Illusions (1995)

What's It About?

New York private detective Harry D'Amour goes to L.A. for a routine job only to wind up in a deadly plot involving a popular illusionist and a desert cult dedicated to resurrecting their dead master.

Is It Any Good?

Whatever you may think of Clive Barker the writer, you have to admit that Clive Barker the film-maker is a bit different.  Barker is a master of atmosphere who can use music to really sell a mood and his talents as a painter make him ideal at setting a scene that looks on film like it would read on the page.  Unfortunately his prose doesn't translate so well to film and for the most part he seems to realize that but he can't mitigate all the dead air in his own movies.

Clive Barker's strength has never been dialogue and since that's the most common way of conveying information in a movie, his movies generally have bad dialogue.  He can write some dynamite one-liners, but conversations are not his strong suit.

Harry D'Amour is a legacy character from Barker's mythology but he hasn't really been in the much of his writing.  He's had a couple of short stories, popped up in a small role in one novel and a had a major role in two others.  Considering that D'Amour is treated like a Raymond Chandler-esque private eye character with a whole series of adventures rather than just a handful, it strikes me strange how often Barker uses him.  D'Amour is ostensibly an occult detective but you couldn't tell it from any part of this movie.  He certainly seems to be aware of the occult but his solution to any given obstacle seems to be to shoot it with the ever-present pistol he carries around in his shoulder holster.  Harry D'Amour seems to be even more beholden to his revolver than "Dirty" Harry Callahan.

Scott Bakula feels like a weird choice to play the title character of this movie, but I would be lying if I said he didn't do a good job.  There is a bit of sag toward the middle of this movie and I'm certain 15-30 minutes could be shaved off the two-hour runtime to make things flow a little better.  That said, Lord of Illusions is actually a great movie and maybe the most solid of Clive Barker's directorial outings.  The movie has a parade of wonderful practical gore effects and one extremely bad computer generated effect at the very end.  The performances are strong, the story is spooky and interesting, and the production design is wonderful.  Mostly Lord of Illusions just seems to be one of the few casualties of the death of the horror genre in the 1990s.  Even more than Nightbreed, Lord of Illusions deserves another look.

Watch, Toss, or Buy?

Buy it.