Hellmaster (1992) is Spookies if it took a shot of Phantasm and snorted a Hellraiser comic
Dear friends, Hellmaster (AKA Them if yer' nasty) is bad. I want to be up front about that. If you want me to judge the film on its ability to have an understandable plot structure, create meaningful character arcs and give something for David Emge to do, then I would be forced to concede there are "gaping flaws." But I can't judge the film on those merits, because I'm a degenerate who has forever championed the cinematic "haunted corn maze turned celluloid experience" that is Spookies. So instead lets talk about how this piece of schlock has seared itself into my soft brain.
John Saxon is Professor Jones, a deranged eugenics-loving mad scientist trope who was presumably killed in the sixties in a college fire. The college has since been rebuilt and is now a weirdly mixed-media obsessed place of learning where people have pseudo intellectual conversations that make me want to swallow a bullet. Essentially a liberal arts college that's used to teach future FBI agents how to hunt a Longlegs or something. However, Professor Jones has returned to his old stomping ground as an even more deranged super-human, who uses a heroin needle super-soaker full of evil juice to control his growing army of weird mutated slaves that land somewhere between Cenobites and Deadites. Enter David Emge whose name you'll instantly forget so lets just call him Flyboy. Flyboy has a score to settle (Read: Dead wife) which he intends to do using a crossbow that fires syringes (They contain undiluted monster juice which is the only thing that can kill Saxon's creations... Look I didn't write this). He'll have to join forces with a bunch of dorky looking youths to stop...Well I guess he's calling himself the Hellmaster? Also the bully kid in this has a bullwhip, and one of the weird monster slaves has a nightstick that has a built in scythe, and when you become a zombie slave you get black fingernails and...
I have seen both cuts of Hellmaster. The apparently "more coherent" theatrical cut known as Them, and the DTV version that had scenes added and was re-edited. Neither of these cuts is easy to follow. This is a movie that begins with the "God is dead" quote by Nietzsche and then takes us everywhere from a handicapped kid having a crisis of faith to college students being menaced by a mutated man-boy who dresses like he's in a ska band. You will be witness to both the handicapped kid scream-crying the words "I'm a cripple!" and the weird man-boy being graphically injected in his mangled neck holes by a syringe of monster juice. There's something intoxicating about this flick though, in a way that reminds me of a disturbing half-remembered nightmare.
John Saxon's mutated slave-monster caper through the college turning annoying academia into a fever dream of hyper-violence. They take many shapes from the aforementioned eerie man-boy, to a twisted schoolgirl, to a leering nun. The school itself is awash in lighting gels, which combined with the bizarre dialogue suggests an Italian production, but this phantasmagoria is as American as apple pie. Cops are dragged behind their cars after being lynched, make out sessions end in a guy melted by toxic waste and I think it deserves to be repeated that the bully character in this film uses a fucking bullwhip to intimidate his peers. The outdoor shots suggest late-fall/early winter and you feel that cold in your bones as creatures who have lost their humanity prowl paths covered in dead leaves. All of Saxon's servants bear his symbol upon their foreheads, one that he marks them with using a signet ring. It is the letter J merged with the image of the cross, a new icon of veneration for a new world order. It is a world you may disdain but will not soon forget. I am in hell, do not help me. See what I did there, I took the Hellraiser II thing but then flipped it...
-Dr. Benny Graves
