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Spine of Night, The
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| Year: |
2021
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Director: |
Philip Gelatt, Morgan Galen King
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| Stars: |
Richard E. Grant, Lucy Lawless, Patton Oswalt, Betty Gabriel, Joe Manganiello, Patrick Breen, Larry Fessenden, Jason Gore, Maggie Lakis, Tom Lipinski, Nina Lisandrello, Rob McClure, Malcolm Mills, Abigail Savage, Jordan Douglas-Smith
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| Genre: |
Horror, Animated, Fantasy, Adventure |
| Rating: |
  6 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
Tzod (Lucy Lawless), the swamp witch and formerly leader of her now wiped out tribe, makes her way up the side of the mountain of the Guardian (Richard E. Grant), aware he is the last hope to rid the world of the evil that has laid waste to the lands and the population. It is all to do with the blue flowers she carries around her necklace, though she does not have as many as she used to, and as she picks through the ruins of the city of the Old Masters, she begins to wonder if her quest has been in vain. But no: The Guardian is here, and he wants to know what she wants with him, for he is dying...
The influence of the animator Ralph Bakshi was all over The Spine of Night, something not only admitted by its writers and directors Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King, but proudly proclaimed, as if they were carrying on a grand tradition of these Robert E. Howard-inflected fantasy adventures when in fact the genre had more or less begun and ended with Bakshi's Fire and Ice in 1983. You could argue he had other works in his canon that owed some debts to the Golden Age of fantasy fiction, specifically his version of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or his retro-futuristic Wizards from the nineteen-seventies.
And then there was the film of Heavy Metal comic from around the same time as Fire and Ice which adopted the same "this is for adults" tone that pretty much guaranteed that kids would want to see it, and indeed claimed it far further than the grown-ups who were supposedly the target audience. Would this happen with The Spine of Night? It featured a more prestigious voice cast than Bakshi was able to afford, but the same rotoscoping techniques were applied, admittedly a cost-cutting exercise for the veteran filmmaker back then, yet in this instance as much an artistic choice as it was a way of keeping the budget low.
As a plot, this featured a love of storytelling, not like bedtime stories but more like a tale told around the campfire by role-players, so it seemed every twenty minutes we were offered a fresh narrative to be related and left a little in the dark as to what they had to do with the rest of the movie. That was down to a new set of characters cropping up with each successive plotline, though some did recur, and others, though apparently dead in previous chapters, would resurrect while in the main, the majority stayed dead. There was a hell of a lot of slaughter here, and though the swordfights were not exactly the greatest you would ever witness, the effects of them saw bodies cleaved in twain and limbs and heads lopped off with gay abandon.
The sheer amount of massacring going on did have a numbing effect, since it seemed no matter who you were, the Grim Reaper was so eager to claim the characters and extras that he was just off stage left, champing at the bit to encourage more horrible demises. Along the way there were idiosyncrasies as you would see in a work created by directors who misspent their youth reading doorstep-sized tomes of sword and sorcery and filling up the rest of the time with Dungeons and Dragons, so one heroine (Betty Gabriel) is a librarian saving books for the threatened civilisation, and the power of arcane knowledge - any kind of knowledge, really - was placed on a pedestal as if rotoscoping were a form of magical rite that they had rediscovered. Not everyone was going to find it appealing, as despite some well-detailed, painted backgrounds the effect was rather primitive, but you quickly got used to it. There was no sense of humour here, but it did have the constructed integrity of the dedicated fantasy fan, and that would find it an audience. Music by Peter Scartabello.
[The Spine of Night - A Shudder Exclusive
New Film Premieres 18th March 2022.]
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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