My boots work best with ground beneath them

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Last October, teenybuffalo wrote about Warlock (1989) and I thought I would like it. Last Friday, she screened it for me and two other friends and indeed this turns out to be the case. I chalk it up to a combination of well-researched witchcraft and Richard E. Grant.

There are actors who grow on me over the years: I see them in half a dozen roles before one suddenly makes them come into focus for me and after that I'll follow them anywhere, like Denholm Elliott in A Doll's House (1973) or Ralph Richardson in The Fallen Idol (1949). This is not the case with Richard E. Grant. As far as I can tell, my deep and unreasonable affection for him rests almost entirely on his performance as the title character in Withnail and I (1987), a film I didn't even like all that much the first time I saw it.¹ It's not that he doesn't have a respectable thirty-year filmography. I've just seen almost none of it. He's the sexiest of the Doctor's short-lived regenerations in the Red Nose Day spoof The Curse of Fatal Death (1999), at least until he accidentally electrocutes himself; he's frustratingly miscast as a straw-haired Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night (1996), where he proves that he can play a witty fool, but not a gormless one. He has a nice small turn as the overdramatically guilt-stricken father of the cursed protagonist in Penelope (2006) and I am perfectly willing to believe I saw him in Gosford Park (2001), but I saw a lot of people in Gosford Park. Someday I will track down Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life (1993), written and directed by Peter Capaldi, and I hope it lives up to its title. But if you mention him by name, Grant always looks to me like a haggard, hungover ex-drama student in a dreadful overcoat and a worse tie and an Aubrey Beardsley sneer, playing flamboyantly the best role of his life, which also happens to be the one that's going to kill him.

At least, prior to Friday night, he did. I may now have to amend this recollection to include a Scottish accent, the nearest thing to a mullet I've seen from the seventeenth century, and a wolf cloak. Sometimes a bullwhip, which we all know was standard gear of the Puritan witchfinders of the New World. Sometimes an iron weathervane, which in 1989—those were the days—he has no trouble taking aboard a coast-to-coast flight. And at no point is he ridiculous. I must stress this fact. Warlock has the kitchen-sink premise (time travel! odd couple! apocalyptic black magic!) and some of the joltingly splashy gore of schlock horror, but its sincerity is one of its greatest strengths. Unwillingly slingshot through time from 1691 Boston to Los Angeles of the film's present day, Giles Redferne remains as staunch in his pursuit of the eponymous Warlock as he was when he left his native Scotland to avenge the death of his beloved wife at the hands of a coldly smiling, fair-haired, frequently barefoot man who might be the son of a fallen angel and might just style himself as Satan's heir, but who delights either way in ruin and horror and casual cruelty of a kind the aimless Kassandra (Lori Singer), a twenty-year-old waitress with diabetes and a wardrobe straight out of MTV, can barely imagine before she finds herself its latest victim. One séance and a couple of murders later, the Warlock is zipping across America in search of the three parts of the Grand Grimoire, a kind of witches' anti-Bible that supposedly preserves the secret true name of God.² Cursed by the Warlock with a random act of malice that will kill her before the end of the week if not broken, Kassandra has no choice but to bail out the archaically-spoken loon who scared the bejeezus out of her when he broke into the crime scene that used to be her apartment and join him on a road trip to stop the Warlock from uncreating the world, or at least seriously fucking it up. With a little more budget, we could be watching a piece of prestige horror; with a splatterier script, we could drink every time someone name-checks the Devil. Instead the film steers a neat course between the pretentious and the trashy, so that at least when we're laughing, we're laughing at the right things. It's a balance I appreciate.

It's not like the film has no sense of humor. It gets the proper mileage out of Kassandra's initial disbelief that any of this supernatural nightmare is really happening and then out of her classically 1980's Californian priorities when she accepts the fact—on discovering that her age has doubled overnight, she fumes, "Twenty fucking years and not one party. What a total ass-burn." Her slangy sarcasm plays well off the King James intensity with which Giles tends to declaim, grounding the script's more obvious blocks of exposition without making him look overblown, while her reluctance to risk her neck for the world keeps her from automatically slotting into heroism by audience identification; they have a believable comradely chemistry as well as the expected friction. There are some lovely, nasty moments with the Warlock, most graphically with a match cut from a frying human tongue to a short-order breakfast, more subtly with a conversational turn that viewers familiar with witch lore will see coming long before the friendly, unbaptized kid does ("I need no broomstick to fly"). But none of it is ever in service of sheer goofiness; the closest the script veers is a piece of double-talk about Giles' witch compass, which thankfully stops short of Abbott and Costello, and a territorial challenge from a Boston cabbie, which gets its humor from the obvious punch line averted. I especially appreciate the film's refusal to play its time travel for laughs. To the Warlock, the twentieth century offers as good an opportunity for blasphemous mischief as the seventeenth—perhaps even better, since it's not like anyone believes in his kind nowadays. Giles is a textbook fish out of water, but he genuinely doesn't seem to care and the film makes a good case in his favor. Give or take three hundred years, the Warlock's awful magic still works and so do Giles' countercharms: that's all he needs to know. Technology does not make much impression on him. He's scared of flying, but so are any number of people born after the invention of the airplane. It's entirely possible he's seen so much weird shit as a vengeful witchfinder that television and radio and big hair and miniskirts just don't cut it when it comes to Clarke's Law.³

And so Warlock can take its witchcraft seriously, which is where it may have won the most points with me. Flying by means of the fat of an unbaptized child? Check. Working harm on an enemy by driving nails into their footprints? Got it. Hex signs? Talk to Pennsylvania Dutch Grandpa, who sees his horse hag-ridden, his cream curdled in the bucket, and his bread refusing to rise, and proceeds to blazon his barn correctly—Giles spies it from the road and knows he has an ally. Countercharms, like salt and iron nails and brass keys and pennies? Giles has a wolf cloak full of them; I was only surprised that rowan never came up. Very little of it is explained for the audience; the script assumes either prior knowledge or a willingness to learn on the run, both of which endear a narrative to me. The stuff it fudges is mostly cosmological. Is the Warlock really a demon's son? Is he really planning to uncreate the universe or does he just want to break it and play with the pieces? Is that seriously meant to be the name of God in the finale? (It's written in the Latin alphabet and it starts with an "R.") Possibly these are plot holes, but the film moves so deftly and swiftly around them that I find I don't care anywhere near as much as if it had faked up all its rituals instead of just the climactic reading of the Grimoire. All of its Latin is dog, but that's historically accurate.

Of course I have complaints. Structurally, the film needs some work—the action is tight and unswerving once Giles and Kassandra hit the road, but that's after a good third of somewhat meandering setup. At first the ticking clock of Kassandra's curse ("a decade twice over a day") looks like the narrative engine, then the treasure hunt takes over. The most risible sequence in the film is unfortunately the opening one, where everyone in the Massachusetts Bay Colony sounds like an émigré from Highlander (1986) and dresses like they passed through Hammer Mitteleuropa on the way over. The unspeakable name of God writhing visibly on the pages of the Grand Grimoire nearly threw me out of the climax, if for no other reason than that I was trying to read it (for the love of Heinrich Agrippa, just put it in angelic script or something, it's safer for everyone). As usual, I am always impressed by how well practical effects hold up when nascent CGI looks silly. And I have utterly shortchanged Julian Sands in this review, when his sleek voice and coolly amused air go a long way toward infusing the film with an atmosphere of real threat as well as enjoyable villainy.

But I'm sorry. He's not Richard E. Grant. I don't care if an American horror film felt like a comedown after the scabrous cult eccentricity of Withnail and I, Grant commits to all of it, even the wolf cloak, and the audience benefits: he very nearly pulls off a Peter Cushing with Giles Redferne, whose backstory is minimal and fridge-y and whose present-day characterization almost solely consists of tracking and battling the Warlock and it doesn't matter; by the point he gives the car keys back to Kassandra, we know him. He is driven, compassionate, adaptable, not infallible, and surprisingly hot for that haircut. She's self-centered, snarky, chronically ill, stubborn, and apparently a professional cellist in real life. I would have happily watched them fight supernatural crime together in a long-running TV show. At least we got the 103-minute cult movie. Is Warlock a great movie? Almost certainly not. But I am delighted to have seen it, and would cheerfully show it to friends, and sometimes that's all you want from a film you've waited a winter to see.

1. It reminded me a lot of early Angela Carter crossed with the seedier bits of M. John Harrison, producing the curious effect that I expected something fantastic-in-the-sense-of-genre to occur at any moment and instead the weekend just kept going amazingly down the plughole, lighter fluid and all. I spent most of the runtime wanting to get away from everyone in the script, Paul McGann's semi-nameless narrator included; in hindsight I have become surprisingly fond of all of them, to the point where I cheered at the appearance of Ralph Brown on Agent Carter (2015) because I haven't seen him as anyone between Danny the drug dealer and Dr. Fennhoff. Like Galaxy Quest (1999), it's one of the movies I have seen once and can quote way too much of, because apparently the entire thing went into permanent storage while I was laughing and/or staring in horror. This is, despite appearances, a recommendation.

2. I admit that at this point I yelled at the screen, "It's not a secret! It's the Tetragrammaton!" but my co-watchers were very kind to me. In point of fact, it's not the Tetragrammaton when we get around to it, but it's clearly meant to be the magical, unpronounceable name that is the sound of creation—reading it backward, we're told, could uncreate not only the world, but all the worlds. This is the sort of thing I associate with golem legend and am now faintly sorry there wasn't more Kabbalah in the movie, although really it's the wrong cosmology for it. I don't know if Zamiel is a real fallen angel, but it's the name given to the Black Huntsman—the Devil—in Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz (1821), so I didn't argue with the Warlock calling on him for aid.

3. Giles' moment of greatest fear is existential horror, not future shock: as we discover in the finale, the last portion of the Grand Grimoire is buried in a churchyard in Boston, clutched in his own centuries-rotted hands. How did that happen? Who cares? The past is another country, and besides, the dude is dead. What matters is that he's brought face to face with his own mortality and Kassandra is the one who has to pry the pages, literally, from his cold dead fingers, while he looks away and blasphemes incredibly politely. I can't tell if there's a temporal paradox here or not—given the film's ending, probably not—but it works as an effective reminder both of the depth of time that lies behind Giles and the fact that, all his white magic and faith notwithstanding, he's not invulnerable. If he doesn't die in the twentieth century, he will in the seventeenth. If the Warlock doesn't get him, time will. That's scary.