"Crowley" DVD

It's an old rule of mine that hasn't been challenged in quite some time, but any time a movie comes to me festooned with pentagrams I know it's a bad sign a-waitin'. And man oh man, is Crowley ever festooned with pentagrams. There's one on the disc, there's one on the disc case, there's one on the case's jacket...they're literally all over the place.

And indeed, my old rule proved solid again tonight--Crowley is a barely watchable piece of sheer garbage designed almost entirely to fellate the ego of a dead man.

Basically, what Crowley is about is a delicate combination of mystical mumbo-jumbo and pure psuedoscientific bullhonkery that allows no less a baddie than Aleister Crowley to come back to life and inhabit the body of a chubby stuttering literature professor. And of course, Crowley wants to stick around in this time plane so he's got to do something called a "chemical wedding" to stick around. I don't know what that is, frankly, and I only just finished watching the movie.

There's a lot of things I don't understand about Crowley, and frankly, I really don't WANT to understand them. I'm not at all surprised that this was co-written by Bruce Dickinson, who turns out to be one of the band members of the group Iron Maiden, thus further proving that any horror movie involving a metal singer or band member is going to be TOTAL garbage.

Seriously--the record goes out the door and into the street: Strangeland, House of 1000 Corpses, and now Crowley.

Crowley's biggest problem is that it takes itself entirely too seriously. It's spewing out garbage about chemical weddings and energy coordinates and all this crapola and not a bit of it is useful or advancing the plot. Plot? What plot? It's some guy staging fifty orgies for two hours because he thinks it makes him some kind of super-league bad guy. Leave it to some has-been chord-cruncher to think that Aleister Crowley is sufficient fodder for a movie.

I will give him credit, however, for advancing the "parallel universe" concept, and his really spiffy suggestion at the end that Bush won the 2000 election mostly because of Crowley. That and I'm not too sure on the historical truth on this, but from what I can tell? There really IS a link between Jack Parsons, Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard. How accurate that link is is anyone's guess, but there's at least a suggestion, so good catch on Dickinson's part.

The ending, perhaps the best part of the movie, is where the best intimations of parallel universes come into play, and this is done surprisingly well. I'm actually quite pleased with how that turned out--too bad the rest of the movie couldn't do as well.

The special features include audio commentary tracks, a making of featurette, deleted scenes, English subtitles, and trailers for Walled In and Crowley.

All in all, Crowley is a sad, pathetic movie devoted to an ego trip for a man who's been dead for years. Talk about your lousy impetuses for a movie.

Crowley
*
DVD

Directed by Julian Doyle

Written by Bruce Dickinson, Julian Doyle

Starring Kay Weber, John Shrapnel, Lucy Cudden, Jon McDowell

Produced by Justin Peyton, Ben Timlett

NR
106 mins
2009

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