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Just in time for Halloween, the folks at Visual Vengeance surprised me with a pair of Blu-rays to review, Despiser and Kung Fu Rascals. Being a fan of writer/director Philip J. Cook’s, recent films, Pungo: A Witch’s Tale and Ghost Planet as well as the earlier Invader, I put Despiser on first.
Gordon Hauge (Mark Redfield, Avenging Force: The Scarab, The Curse of the Screaming Dead) is having a bad day. He’s lost his job, gotten evicted and his wife Maggie (Gage Sheridan, Twilight of the Dogs, First Encounter) has left him. Then to cap it off, he swerves to avoid a couple of kids, played by the director’s daughters Alexandra and Roxanne, and wrecks his car, landing himself in purgatory where he’s immeadiatly attacked by Shadowmen.
Fortunately, he’s rescued by Carl Nimbus (Doug Brown) who explain that The Shadowmen are under the control of The Despiser, who isn’t as you might expect, a demon, but an alien whose ship crashed at Tunguska in 1908, and since it died on Earth it ended up in our Purgatory. Carl and his team have been recruited by God to defeat the creature before it can break down the barrier between purgatory and the world of the living
Gordon actually manages to return to the land of the living on his own. But when The Despiser manages to get his hands on Maggie’s soul, he’s forced to return to Purgatory to help Carl defeat the creature once and for all.
Shot in 2002 and released a year later, Despiser used CGI and green screens to provide most of the film’s sets and backgrounds, a year before Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was released. Unfortunately, while that film had the resources of a major studio behind it, Cook had, as he says in an interview included on the Blu-ray, a few Pentium 486, or possibly 386 systems, to work with. It’s still an impressive achievement for it’s time, but as you might imagine, everything looks like it was taken from a video game.
But that unreal look actually fits rather well with Despiser’s otherworldly setting and plot, which mashes up religion, science fiction and action film tropes with a total lack of regard for logic or anything else that might get in the way. How strange is it? Purgatory isn’t just filled with crucified bodies, it has cars, deserted cities, lots of guns and even ballistic missiles that our villain needs to blast his way into our world. And the film’s climax involves detonating them with a hand grenade.
Overall, it’s the sort of weird indie film that fuels nostalgia for the days when Friday meant combing the racks at the local video store for something new and different. While it may run a bit long at an hour and forty-five minutes, the Despiser is a fun watch for those who can get past the dated graphics.
Visual Vengeance has given Despiser a beautiful transfer, and added a long list of extras, which you can see below. There are plenty of trailers, including one for a film called Fungicide which I’d never heard of before, but need to see, and an informative commentary track featuring director Philip J. Cook and stars Mark Redfield and Gage Sheridan that stand out among them.
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