IHR induction #39: "The Serpent and the Rainbow" (1987, Wes Craven)

Well, fellow horror nerds, we're living in a time when the zombie movie is...quite prevalent. Those who know me on a few message boards are likely sick of hearing me harp on this subject, but zombie movies...ugh. Some of them are very good; many of them are just very monotonous, and seem utterly constricted not only by a very stringent set of rules and regulations (think slasher movies with more flesh-eating), but in the way they go about telling the story. Granted, I'm not the foremost authority on zombie films, but when it comes to the ones that people have seen in the last 20 years or so, they fit into one of two categories:

(1) Overtly political hamfest where human beings < zombies on the morality barometer, or;

(2) Out-and-out cheesefest, which may or may not be parody.

Wes Craven' 1987 film "The Serpent and the Rainbow" is a movie that few people remember; it was in and out of theaters in the time it takes to drive to a fast-food restaurant, and didn't do much business in the rental market. It was also released during one of horror's severe down times; slasher movies had died a slow, painful death, and while Freddy Krueger was riding strong, Jason Voorhees was seeing steadily declining return. 23 years later, however, and viewed without the prism of trend, this movie is just amazing on so many levels. In the humble opinion of this reporter, it's one of the SCARIEST movies of all time, bar none, and has a few well-written characters played by accomplished actors. To this day, this remains Craven's best movie by a country mile (yep, way better than "Nightmare," "Scream," "Red Eye" and even "Deadly Friend").

THE MOVIE!!

The film is based on a book of the same name by Wade Davis, but to say that the film is freely adapted is one of the most liberal adaptations of this phrase ever put to celluloid. Anyway, what the flick gives us is your basic treasure hunting setup. Your main character is Dennis Alan (played by Bill Pullman, who invests tons of heart and soul into the character), an anthropologist hired by a humongo pharmaceutical corporation to retrieve a precious voodoo drug from Haiti. Since "Serpent and the Rainbow" runs a robust 90 minutes, it wastes little time getting to the meat of the story (man, I love that phrase).

The middle act of "Serpent and the Rainbow" is made up largely of passages where Pullman gets to know the lay of the land, both political and spiritual. Haiti is in the midst of a vast revolution against its totalitarian government, which is represented in the film by the quite terrifying figure Captain Dargent Peytraud (Zakes Mokae, absolutely aces in this role). Seeing as how Peytraud is staunchly militaristic, the background of revolution only makes him more ill-tempered, providing the movie with some of its best scenes as the Captain grows none too enamored with this overzealous Westerner discovering the secrets of the island.

A few words on those secrets. For any uninitiated souls out there, the term "zombie" actually has its roots in Haitian voodoo; rather than being undead brain eaters, real-life zombies (and there have been several documented cases for anyone willing to look) are corpses that have been reanimated by the force of external drugs. These stories were talked about with much fear in the days of slavery; slaves looked forward to death, as it meant an end to their misery, but indeed some could not escape servitude even in death. Haitian zombies, in essence had no will or personality of their own other than their master's. In the world of this film, Haitian voodoo is the mechanism that Captain Peytraud and the government uses to keep the people of the island in fear.

During the course of the film, Pullman meets up with a witch doctor named Mozart (Brent Jennings), even witnessing the death of a local woman in the film's first act (and by the way, there are two nightmare sequences that revolve around this very woman that are two of the movie's most effective and horrifying scenes - that snake to the head is vicious). After the mandatory run-ins with Peytraud, Pullman goes back to Mozart, and the duo begin their final experiments creating the perfect zombie drug for mass production.

Many critics view the final act of this film as a let-down after the very story and character-heavy initial two-thirds. Personally, I believe "Serpent and the Rainbow" to be one of the very best-executed horror thrillers of all time; it spends just the right amount of time making its plot and people seem important. Thus, when all hell breaks loose, there's a genuine emotional investment in the outcome. Not to mention that we are also privy to two of the single most painful and/or scary scenes in film history in the form of torturous acts that Peytraud takes against Pullman. But I'll leave those up to the viewer to discover.

Finally, in addition, this is yet another movie that was introduced to me on TNT's MonsterVision, and that was one Saturday night where sleep didn't come easy. I'd seen Romero's lurching, rotting zombies many times before; I'd never seen anything quite like the world that Wes Craven presented in this film, where undead human beings were a result of religious practice and a brutal dictatorship was just as much of a threat as bitchy humans barricading themselves against hordes of brain-hungry ghouls. It was due to this film that I did more reading up on the subjects of zombification and voodoo, and I'd highly recommend that any horror fan out there OD'd on the Dawn-Shaun's of the world should do the same. Trust me - hearing some of the stories that have come down the pike from Haiti throughout the years is instant nightmare fuel, even for the most jaded horror fan. This movie will conjure up curiosity in yo9ur mind to seek out that very fuel. You have been warned.