Review: The Serpent and the Rainbow
Blu-ray: The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)
Based on a true(ish) story and a departure in tone for director Wes Craven, The Serpent and the Rainbow looks at Voodoo and whether there really are such things as zombies.
Harvard anthropologist Dennis Alan (Bill Pullman) is in the Amazon rainforest studying rare herbs and medicines with a local shaman. He drinks a potion and experiences a hallucination of a man surrounded by corpses in a bottomless pit.
Years later Alan is approached by a pharmaceutical company looking to investigate a drug used in Voodoo to create zombies, they want to use the drug as a “super anaesthetic“, so they send him to Haiti where he meets Dr. Marielle Duchamp (Cathy Tyson).
The original cut of this film was an hour longer, but Craven cut it down for being too ‘talky’. This is a real departure for him, but the last third of the film descends into the usual Craven tropes and I expected the bad guy to put on a bladed glove and come up with a Freddy ‘Nightmare on Elm St’ quip. Which is a shame really.
I have to mention the original cover of the film too, is it just me that thinks it looks like Adrian Edmondson?
EXTRAS: Includes a great bonus double-sided fold out poster of all new artwork created by Rich Davies.
Review by Tina from a disc kindly supplied by Fabulous Films.
