Bad Magic (1998)

 

Directors: John and Mark Polonia

Cast: Vincent Simmons as Renny; Bob Dennis; Maria Davis; Bruce Hardy as Tobanga; Dave Harmon

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #166 / An Abstract List Candidate

 

They were all Catholic. We're Methodist!

First of all - I wished this film was actually called Cruel Magic. All because as a heavy metal fan, with the song stuck in my head, I cannot help but think now of a track by an obscure Britain band Satan who gained a greater amount of attention with the 2018 album of the same name. It would also be more metaphorically apt for what this film's plot is about, a return to Planet Polonia, an obscure production which immediately shows how weird it will get in the opening - of voodoo objects, smoke, fake dime store skulls and sex with a monologue heard about voodoo's history, all with the opening credits even including that they apparently hired a voodoo consultant.

Premise wise, in a world of New York City footage and a green hazy sky, this is a premise you would find in a 1940s radio drama turned into a 65 minutes SOV film. A young African-American man named Renny, wishing to get revenge on the gang that brought in his younger brother Amos only to get him killed during an attempted bank robbery, sells his soul to use voodoo magic to pick the small gang off one-by-one. It is inevitable, once his work is done, his soul is to be claimed.

Bad Magic at times feels like a production partially improvised, or at least using other Polonia brothers' work for footage, such as the beginning having an entire tangent of a demon terrorising two guys in a countryside cottage, an entirely different narrative told in very little time which has its own absurdities - be it a demon, an actor in a mask and furry legs still wearing a shirt, vomiting on some poor person to death by hairdryer, or a demon being killed by having its head kept under water. To the brothers' credits, starting as young adults in the eighties before this, they found ways to add production value and even when it is ridiculous, and involves video toaster effects (including a screen being ripped from the middle four ways like paper), it became part of their own logic and is, darn it, actually charming.

For example, they found a way around having their lead going to the Caribbean to find a witch doctor to teach him magic - by having him in close up against a plain wall looking off to the side, cutting this to footage of an airplane in the sky in the distance, and actual footage from the Caribbean likely taken from a vacation and spliced in, even if it does return back to a small room back home where he gets to the person he is looking for. Not a decrepit and half blind old man, but a young man, if you notice, is also wearing jeans under the costume. I will not mock this, nor belittle that the acting in general is not great, as at this point I am well aware one of the prime investments in no-budget cinema is as much attempting elaborate stories at this level of budget and the charm from it.

That and when they get weird. This film already starts off strangely before we get to the voodoo, with the fact after the initial set up the film will abruptly have sudden cuts to the leads eyes in among scenes setting up the antagonists, jarring as a result. With laughing and flashing in the audio-visual construction keeping one off guard in its charmingly quirky way, eventually the video effects kick in fully alongside how much of the film was greatly helped by thrift stores. Plastic skulls, coloured candles and textile skull masks among others do suggest a film built from cheap stores, in itself an aesthetic that would be worthy to exploit in cinema if you do not have the budget for anything more elaborate. This type of cinema has gained a cult for many due to the ingenuity of the creators, a sense of admiration between viewers to the creators that they were once viewers of horror films too but managed to find a way to make a film in their own back yards. The aeshtetic of films like this cannot also help but evoke that a lot of the resergence in interest in these films is as much nostalgia which can be set off, literally in a plasticated form of what Marcel Proust experienced, just by encountering some kitsch object used as a prop you had fond memories of having or seeing when you were younger. Besides, they even managed to acquire a real snake and probably treated it more humanely than some largely scale productions just by filming it by itself, among the many examples of how the Polonia brothers found solutions; you still witness it eating a real mouse, which will put off some, but there is probably more production value without anything more elaborate in seeing an actual snake flexing its head in inhuman ways, all alongside plastic ones being waved around in other scenes.

I have also developed a fascination with the scores for these films, as I had for horror films of a larger budget, and here, if ever there was a score that sounded like a mid nineties video game, Bad Magic had it. Lo-fi dronings; tropical New Age; MIDI rock; you have a gamut of tracks and I was compelled to them all. Even the unnervingly quaint music set to when someone is stabbed abruptly in the neck.

To be honest, Bad Magic's story is so basic, predictable to the point it is not interesting at all, that these little details and the tone is really what you should want to see this film for, as the story is so obvious that you would be bored out of your mind if it was not for how distinctly odd the presentation is on any budget. The Polonia brothers in general, from what I have seen, produced some strange creations, belying how my introduction to them, through Feeders (1996), felt not a real experience of their quality or is a film in itself worthy reinvestigation from a light of greater interest in these type of films. I admire if anything how idiosyncratic they were; even with a Mark Polonia film after his brother's passing, Bride of the Werewolf (2019), even if I was not impressed by it you have the charm of a film set in the middle of Eastern European but entirely shot in the middle of the United States, that not being an issue for him in the slightest. Here you have such examples of this from one of the them playing a john to a sex worker, or in what is clearly another film of theirs being used on a TV, has one of them gleefully looking on, bearing in mind the Polonia brothers were identical twins, as the other is feed into a wood chipper.

They, not surprisingly, were horror fans whose sense of interest comes from real love, where they manage to cram in a Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine in as bathroom reading material in one scene, showing their obsession but alongside their numerous little quirks along the way, such as toilet related trauma happening again when someone is bound by sentient toilet paper than stabbed by flying sentient knives. I still think, even in the late nineties, having voodoo as a dark power, like an old pulp story, is still problematic, especially as Wes Craven danced around this subject with greater subtlety (whether it worked or not) with The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988). Thankfully, a lot of the film is less reducing this real religious practice into anything really offensive but an almost narcoleptic and weird VHS experience. It also has a sense of humour which helps, as really how could you take seriously a film where a character calls another a "cheeselicker" abruptly.

The film is also probably not meant to be seen when exhausted from a day at work as I was the first time viewing Bad Magic, falling in and out of near sleep with no fault to the film. Then again, it is probably appropriate as, whilst the predictable plot keeps some semblance of what is going on that helps, once you get to the video effects for astral projection by way of a starry black background and video effects, the narcoleptic effects whilst being half asleep was probably how films like this got their greatest power. You find yourself, as I did, in a finale in Hell eventually where the main demon claiming Renny's soul in a cute looking puppet with big teeth, whilst cats are being stroked ominously in close up is between torture and beheadings. For many this is not cinema, which is unfair. It is a world onto its own, and by that finale, it was as befittingly strange as one would hope for like a curious dream.

Abstract Spectrum: Lo-Fi/Psychotronic/Video Toaster/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Hallucinations (1986)

Directors: John Polonia, Mark Polonia, Todd Michael Smith

Screenplay: John Polonia, Mark Polonia, Todd Michael Smith

Cast: John Polonia, Mark Polonia, Todd Michael Smith

[Some Minor Spoilers]

If anything, this feels like an appropriate way to talk about the Polonia Brothers, twin micro-budget filmmakers John and Mark Polonia who made curiosities like this or Splatter Farm (1987). They kept working through the nineties and millennium, and whilst John Polonia passed in 2008, his brother Mark is making films to this day. Around the time of this review, admittedly one of Mark Polonia's solitary films I watched was Bride of the Werewolf (2019), which to be brutally honest wasn't interesting, sluggish and without a spark to it.  Thankfully, Hallucinations is a better glimpse at their cult reputation, even if you didn't take into consideration where this film is made by three people who are the only cast, the Polonia brothers and co-director Todd Michael Smith, the Polonia brothers just between seventeen or eighteen, and Todd Michael Smith only a year older.

As Hallucinations shows, a lack of resources is not a detriment, a joy to be had in this film from Middle America where the cherub faced and pencil moustached leads are barely into being adults onscreen, nonetheless going for broke with the energy behind the camera. The aforementioned three, baring a cat, take turns to play strange hallucinations that start to plague the (same) three boys left on their own their mother is absent at work, be it a hooded monk to a loon using a blowtorch. About these three sad people, one of the Polonia playing the sensitive "younger" brother most affected by their mother's absence, the film is surprisingly melancholic alongside its strange sense of violence and weirdness that adds a great deal.

It is a slow start, segments setting up their ordinary world including establishing the snow covered rural environment, or the amusement of a Polonia using a sex phone line with one of the directors clearly providing the women's voice on the other end. It does escalate within the surviving VHS transfer's haze, as Hallucinations does get increasingly strange. Helping the film is that, rather than attempting to be a complex narrative with limited resources, its three friends creating a string of gory and odd sequences tentatively strung together a surprising consistency throughout. There a surprising maturity among the silliness too, in that for all you will witness, it's a film as much about absence and loss that influences what takes place. Even when the first major event transpires, the abrupt death of the family cat, it's played less with gusto but an actual tragedy even if a doll will urinate on her photograph in the later segments.

And, to this young trio's credit, whilst the moments of splatter are surprisingly accomplished, it gets increasingly darker in its post Nightmare on Elm Street logic. Let's not ignore the practical effects - basic gore and fake dismemberment, but someone also created a false torso for one of the Polonia brothers to wear, wisely shooting the prop by itself in close up when one of them have a blowtorch burn through it in a torture sequence in a basement. When the hallucinations get weird though is where things get interesting and in inspired ways, probably exemplified by one of the Polonias on a toilet defecates a knife from him, a legitimately surreal and freakish idea which is both perversely funny but would actually cause an audience to squirm.

A lot of the hallucinations are simply put together using stop motion techniques for some, editing techniques or one of the trio in a costumes for others, which are b-movie horror images that in some cases have a real primal fear to them on this lo-fi video, like a crazed psycho in one chasing a Polonia through a field in snow bound daylight. Even the weirdest ones have a semblance of real dream logic, such as a doll coming to life and pissing on people, mocking someone for their sadness, a playfulness to psychotronic cinema found in Hallucinations but also vivid at its best as here. That the film is shot in such a fragile medium as videotape helps greatly, late eighties Middle America here not took in with trends and having near timelessness as a result, an isolated house in the snow with all the VHS noise and ghostly effects affecting the material profusely.

The result is a good way to "get" this type of cinema. Barring an implied encounter between a cat and a chainsaw, and the whole thing with a knife, Hallucinations could be easier to sell to people if they know how it feels like an accomplishment in context, considering the resources at hand, literally three people and whatever they could access or provide. The fact it's all under an hour means it doesn't test a person's patience either. Barring in mind the participants' ages and the pace, that there's nothing particularly here that becomes sluggish or falls into an aimless attempt at exposition is increasingly better when it concentrates on other material. The Polonia brothers as mentioned continued, but Hallucinations for me was a breath of fresh air which explained their appeal considerably. Definitely, absolutely, a rich vein of weirdness to appreciate.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Hazy/Psychotronic/Surreal/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium