Chemical Wedding

It's interesting that the current economics of film distribution don't really allow time for a new movie to develop an audience. A movie's fate is usually decided by the opening week's box-office, and the opinions of the ever-increasing number of film critics, particularly internet based. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the democratisation of online publishing, in fact I fully support it. Websites, such as this one, reach a much larger audience than most equivalent print magazines, but what they generally lack is the same standards of journalism. One online review I read for a film on a well-known film website said of the movie, "This film is crap". That was the extent of the review. There was no justification from the writer as to why he reached that opinion and I am sure that however bad it was (and I'm not sure it was that bad a film if memory serves me right) it was a lot better than any film the reviewer had ever made. But I digress.

The point I am trying to make is that films take time to find their audience, especially if they don't have a huge marketing machine behind them. On most studio movies the marketing budget is often larger than the shooting budget, which is why the opening week is so important, in commercial terms, because once the punters realise that the marketing hype was just that – hype – word of mouth will kill a film even quicker than the so-called expert critics' opinions.

Films become cult films through word of mouth. That's how it used to work and it still does today to a certain extent except now it is through DVD releases. DONNIE DARKO, SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION and FIGHT CLUB are three prime examples of films that didn't do so well in the cinemas but have become cult classics through DVD. Hopefully the same fate will befall CHEMICAL WEDDING. OK, it's not quite in the same league as the aforementioned trio, but for an independent British genre film it has a lot going for it, not the least of which is Simon Callow's performance.

After its world premiere at SFL7 the film never really got a decent cinema release, for whatever reason, but now it is out on DVD it will hopefully find its audience, and there is definitely one out there for this movie. THE WICKER MAN is considered one of the greatest British horror films ever made but, in my opinion, it is grossly overrated (so let's not even talk about the remake) and CHEMICAL WEDDING is a far superior film. For anyone with even a passing interest in the occult will find far more information in this script than WICKER MAN even imagined, and it still manages to throw in some nudity. Let's face it; most (male) people only develop an interest in the occult because of an imagined promise of naked females, and not for any other reason. One of the problems with the film is that it does try to pack a bit too much information into the script that goes beyond the basic story of the resurrection of arch occultist Aleister Crowley, which can make it a bit confusing for those without much knowledge of the arcane or esoteric. Thankfully the DVD release has commentaries from co-writers Julian Doyle and Bruce Dickinson, as well as some other extras, that explain the larger concepts included in the film.

But the film is not just intellectual stimulation (or any other kind), it is also good entertainment mostly thanks to Callow's completely over-the-top rendition of the bumbling university professor transformed into the outrageously misbehaving vehicle of The Beast that was Crowley. All that and sci-fi as well. What is there not to like?