VIDEO
Faust: Love of the Damned


Starring: Mark Frost
Mosaic Movies
Rental/£50 (dealer price)
MMR20149
Certificate: 18
Available now


"From the producer of Re-Animator". so says the splash across the front of the video box. What the cover blurb fails to add is that this guarantees nothing. Put bluntly, Faust is one of the worst films I've ever seen. And I've seen some rubbish in my time, let me tell you.

A man who has been driven mad by the violent killing of his girlfriend sells his soul for the power of revenge but chickens out of his agreement with the dark forces and is summarily dispatched to hell. But he escapes the fiery pit (by digging with his hands!) and returns to earth as a sort of anti-Batman - all red cape and horns and biff, pow moves. Unfortunately, his devilish makeup is 'not good'. not even by the standards of Carry on Screaming.

Meanwhile, a doctor who helped the mad man - before he returned from the grave - gets beaten up and put in a metal bikini. She loves it and is soon asking to be raped. A policeman wanders around and gets killed while a bunch of people in dark clothes plan on calling up a mighty demon - because they want to.

More stuff happens - mainly killings - a naked woman gets a snake pulled from her stomach while another gets her breasts enlarged to titanic proportions by a minion of Satan. I could go on but frankly I'm losing the will to live. Slash! Kill! Maim! Talk rubbish! Act badly!

But the wooden acting, which makes Bob the Builder look like a RADA lovie, is nothing compared to the dialogue. It's like the outpouring of all those monkeys trying to write Shakespeare - but on a very bad day. At one point the principal protagonist leers over at the doctor in the metal bikini and mumbles: "When your father raped you, you loved it. It's the only love you've ever known." Stop now.

How Faust ever got made is a mystery. At heart it's a misogynist slasher, which is pretty repellent for starters, but that's only part of its transgression. Randomly plotless, badly directed, boasting dialogue seemingly written by a lunatic with only a passing familiarity with the English language, and doused in several gallons of fake blood, the movie commits every known cinematic crime and then adds a couple of new ones just for good measure. This is truly a film to avoid. Horrific, but not the way its makers intended.

Anthony Clark

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£65.09 (Blackstar.co.uk)

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