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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
Don't Bury It. . .It's Not Dead!, October 28, 2003
Before venerable horror maven Wes Craven directed the highly acclaimed SCREAM trilogy, many serious and critical fans of horror cinema considered THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW to be his masterpiece. Not only is the direction tight and top-notch, but the acting is superb--Bill Pullman and Cathy Tyson are quite convincing as the endagered principals, with excellent character actors like Paul Winfield, Zakes Mokae, and Paul Guilfoyle fleshing out a wonderful supporting cast--and the story is sufficiently tense and creepy. It is one of the few horror films to deal with voodoo practices in a serious and non-condescending manner, often compared by film critics and historians to Jacques Tourneur's classic voodoo flick I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943).Much ado has been made concerning the uneveness of this effort from Craven, particularly how the film supposedly jumps back and forth between horror and straight drama. However, these inaccurate interpretations likely stem from a misunderstanding of Craven's use of his source material, anthropologist E. wade Davis' non-fictional book THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW. It is true that Craven and his scriptwriters were INSPIRED by the book--which is a TRUE account of Davis' infiltration of Haiti's voodoo culture in search of a plant-based sedative reputedly used to create "zombies"--but the plot of the film is NOT, as many believe, a visual retelling of the book. This is clearly evidenced by the fact that the main character, ethnobotanist Dennis Alan (excellently played by Bill Pullman), is not named after the author of the aforementioned book. Add to this the film's numerous supernatural and magical plot elements and it should be easy to comprehend that this is indeed a FICTIONAL horror film. That said, it could be cogently argued that with THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW, Craven was attempting to recreate the realistic and austere timbre of his earlier horror films like THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and THE HILLS HAVE EYES. As Craven himself has stated in many interviews, he and his crew did indeed face many real dangers when filming THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW in Haiti and the Dominican Republic--there was political unrest in Haiti at the time, and voodoo practioners were often vehemently private or secretive--and this risky on-location shooting most certainly helped to create an eerie atomosphere and added an amazing sense of reality and credibility to the film's preternatural voodoo sequences. Of course, such realism makes it easier for the viewer to suspend disbelief, and this, combined with the non-fictional "source" material, could explain why some viewers find it hard determine if the movie is a docu-drama or a horror flick. But for the true horror aficionado, and especially for long-time fans of Wes Craven, it is this gritty slice-of-life approach that has propelled the director to the top of the genre. THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW is a great horror film, both believable and downright scary in its semi-authentic depiction of voodoo practices and rituals in the West Indies. Though it is often wrongly neglected or disparaged by casual audiences, a viewing will earn the film a revered spot in the collection of any serious fan of cinematic horror. And it's a must-own for Wes Craven fans.
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