Faust: Love of the Damned (2000)

(In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) Seeing that Brian Yuzna was Faust: Love of the Damned’s director was enough to convince me to record and watch the film. Yuzna is a proud-and-loud proponent of wild horror movies: he produced, wrote or directed several very enjoyable genre classics between 1985 and 2005(ish), and while some of his films are far better regarded than others (anyone with Re-Animator, From Beyond, Society and Return of the Living Dead 3 on their resume is someone worth noticing), there’s usually something interesting in even the weakest of his films. Such is the case with Faust: Love of the Damned, a horror film that sometimes plays like an energetic remake of Batman (down to a very similar “character swoops down from a rotunda” shot) with added gore, nudity and a deal with the devil. It’s not a great movie – but at its best you can see it as a successor to the wilder horror movies of the 1980s (many of them from Yuzna). The plot describes the deal that our protagonist makes with a supernatural entity in order to be able to avenge the death of his girlfriend at the hands of underworld hoodlums. The protagonist predictably gets more and more demon-like as the story progresses. The nudity is punishing, as the film’s biggest special effect showcase is a grotesque body-horror riff that starts with a naked woman and then makes it worse and worse. (And that’s not even covering the semi-comic makeup for the main character.) But while Yuzna is willing to go wild in helming the film, he’s not quite as good in realizing the potential of his material – many of the action sequences are shot in a very dull fashion that doesn’t impress not capitalize on the film’s assets – and the biggest exception seems taken from 1989’s Batman. Still, I had more fun watching Faust: Love of the Damned than many other horror movies of that era: it’s not respectable, not refined and not subtle at all, but it doesn’t intend to be. Watch a Yuzna film, and dive into the more insane end of the horror pool.