No.61 : Warlock (1989)

Warlock at the IMDb

The good police folk of 17th century Boston have done a fine job in capturing slick back hair baddie Julian Sands. Sadly their long title sequence walk through the town gives him ample time to escape through a handy time bubble. Only witch hunter supreme Richard E Grant is on the ball and dives in after him. As movie law dictates the bubble deposits them in contemporary Los Angeles, where their battle continues.

Sands is on a quest to reunite three sections of a book, a task that offers the reward of revealing God’s name and the chance to unravel humanity. He gets his orders through a phoney medium who is most surprised to be channelling the devil himself. She also provides Sands with a handy page finder in the form of her eyes which swivel about in his palm, offering directions.


Grant on the other hand falls into the lap of Kassandra “with a ‘K’” played by the cello girl off ‘Fame’. She is a bit sceptical at first of Grant’s bad acting and furry coat but comes around when Sands curses her to age 20 years a day. The trio get into various scrapes one of which suggests that Grant was wrongly omitted from Great Britain’s Olympic javelin squad. As you’d have guessed from the off the pages are eventually assembled and the bad word is about to be spoken - can the world be saved? I’ll give you a clue - there were two sequels to this masterpiece.

I quite enjoyed this piece of 80s hokum. It is basically a straight steal from ‘The Terminator’ with time travelling warriors having a dust up in contemporary LA with a modern girl brought along for good measure. There are loads of fish out of water moments with Grant getting the phone, cars and planes all wrong. He does get a four foot weather vane onto a plane so good work there - I got manhandled for having toothpaste!

The special effects are rubbish to the point of ridiculousness with Sands’ flying especially ropey. The dialogue is atrocious and when married to Grant’s Scottish accent it’s often watch through your fingers time. Sands as the cold evil bad guy is as scary as Big Bird but he gives good value with his cold bloodied killing of a child and portentous speeches.

‘Warlock’ is a poorly written and terribly acted piece of nonsense that employs pathetic effects and is predictable throughout. Quite taken by its cheezy charms though!

Best Bit : Eye, eye, they’re over there!

‘W’ Score 14/23