Warlock arrived on Home Video this week in 1991, after it premiered at Cannes in May of 1989. It opened in the UK and Australia that June of that year, then disappeared for eighteen months before finally getting a lukewarm US theatrical release on January 11th, 1991.
New World Pictures went broke during the delay, so Trimark picked up the pieces.
It’s another mid-budget high-concept movie should have been swept under the rug and forgotten. Except it wasn’t. It got two sequels and people still bring it up as a cult favourite. Somewhere along the way, it found its fans through late-night cable and video rentals.
And to be fair, there’s a lot to like here. Steve Miner directed everything with his usual steady hand, Julian Sands and Richard E. Grant were two arthouse leads doing a New World Pictures B-movie and giving it their all – and Lori Singer’s wig did the same. Jerry Goldsmith’s score was also an absolute highlight. None of these people needed to be making Warlock in 1989.
David Twohy was on his second screenplay after Critters 2. He’d also go on to write and direct Pitch Black and Below (a personal favourite). His original idea was to make the warlock a persecuted figure from the 17th century, someone who’d come forward to modern times only to be persecuted again, for different reasons. Instead, here Satan is real, the warlock is evil, the witch hunter is the good guy. It didn’t stray too far from the Terminator formula.
It got a couple of sequels because the rental numbers worked out, and not because anyone had a story they were dying to continue.
So, they weren’t really sequels. Anthony Hickox made the 1993 follow-up as though the original film didn’t happen. Same thing again happened to the third entry in 1999. It was mostly about putting the word “Warlock” on a VHS box and seeing what happened.
What audiences were actually loving, in hindsight, was the craft. Pun intended. The parts of the film where the filmmakers brought in more than the script needed, and not just Grant’s Oscar-worthy performance or Goldsmith’s score.
Underneath it all is a tight supernatural cat-and-mouser that looks good on the shelf next to The Prophecy, Highlander or The First Power.
-Pop