Just a few years before reinvigorating the James Bond franchise with GoldenEye (1995) Martin Campbell directed the film Cast A Deadly Spell (1991) for HBO. Cast A Deadly Spell came out during HBO’s heyday as a producer of feature films. The pictures HBO produced in the nineties were adventurous gambles that spanned genres and often afforded auteurs a freedom that was denied elsewhere. Cast A Deadly Spell, which defies easy categorization, was just the kind of adventurous genre bending film HBO was backing at the time.
Cast A Deadly Spell feels more like a Full Moon Feature than anything else. It features hand puppet monsters, rubber suits, practical optical effects and a healthy dose of gore that were all hallmarks of Charles Band’s production company. But what Cast A Deadly Spell does is to imbue a Raymond Chandler style mystery with these macabre hallmarks to create a new breed of mystery thriller. Essentially Cast A Deadly Spell is a synthesis of neo-noir and Lovecraftian horror that sees a fedora wearing gumshoe face-off against a grotesque tentacle monster.
The brilliance of Cast A Deadly Spell is that it finds overlaps between its two genres, particularly with regards to the roles that women play. The virgin to be sacrificed to a monster is also the foil to the femme fatale who in turn is aligned with evil sorcery. Motifs and archetypes between the genres are synthesized into something new. Creating a kind of post-modernist hybrid. Cast A Deadly Spell isn’t always successful at this program, but it is always interesting and original as it navigates two very different aesthetic worlds.
Luckily Cast A Deadly Spell is available on Max and hasn’t been cast off into obscurity. It’s an odd film, but one well worth seeing for fans of genre cinema. Curiously, Cast A Deadly Spell was successful enough to merit a sequel starring Dennis Hopper and directed by Paul Schrader.
