Bad Magic (1998), by Mark and Jon Polonia

I cannot say that it's right for me to go into a description of why this movie makes me Super Happy, and not just regular Happy. It is made by the Polonia Brothers, who are Trash Kings of the Universe Forever. Describing their legacy is something better saved for their most infamous effort, 1987's Splatter Farm, which is also one of my favorites. This one isn't as good as Splatter Farm in my mind, because it's not as grotesque and shocking as that film. All the same, it is grotesque and shocking as far as production quality, special effects, acting, editing, and relevance/semblance to real life go. Plus, I remembered it because I needed a double feature with my rewatch of Witchdoctor of the Living Dead. Bad Magic is Witchdoctor of the Living Dead made by Americans. It has the same frenetic jerkiness. The same emphasis on black magic as told through an anarchic dismissal of the idea of magic having rules. The same impossibly shitty acting. It's a blast of a nuclear variety--so let's begin our descent into a black pit called Hell.

Renny seeks to avenge his brother Amos, who was killed during a gang war. Rather than doing, say, anything but learning the secrets of black magic for revenge, his first course of action involves learning the secrets of black magic for revenge. He reads an account which creates flashbacks to the 1993 Polonia film Hellspawn. He eventually goes to "the West Indies" in search of a magician named Tobanga. Bizarrely, and perhaps upsettingly, Tobanga is a white guy. Tobanga enjoys laughter and hitting people in the face with snakes. He teaches Renny of Bluh-key-bluh-kay, the Spirit of Revenge, and gives him four magic tools with which he may destroy the Red Claws, the gang of fat nerdy guys who killed his brother. But of course, there is a price that Renny must pay when his quest for revenge ends...a quest that involves prostitutes in fake wigs, demons with Texas drawls, and toilet-paper mummies. In the end, we cannot forget what is probably the most important lesson of the film: that advertising for Les Miserables looked exactly the same in 1998 as it does in 2016.

This is a bullet-point movie--the fine details of it are best summarized and described as a string of bullet points. There are things that "happen," most or all of them hilarious. Here are some of them:

•  First of all I want to say that the guy who plays Renny is the worst actor of all time. The absolute worst. He is constantly bored and/or stoned, moreso even than Ted from Crypt of Dark Secrets. He is bored by drinking a god's blood and by being attacked by snakes, and he completely destroys a very workable script. He does a killer evil laugh, though, which gives us the impression that even if revenge didn't play a part, Renny would kill people anyway, for fun. Which is, of course, inconsistent with the ending. I am deeply saddened that this actor, Vincent Simmons, has no other credits to his name--a name that should be praised.  
• Renny tries to bribe Tobanga to train him when the latter initially refuses to do so. The two bills he throws at him are clearly ones. I like to think that in the universe of this movie Renny did really try to bribe Tobanga for two dollars, and this isn't supposed to be some representational theatre thing.
• This movie probably has the same soundtrack as High Kicks. Prepare for a '90s-gasm, which is like an orgasm but with mullets. Except unlike High Kicks, it also has shitty '90s video graphixxx, which doubles the awesome.  
• There is some unfortunately real animal violence (a snake eating a mouse). Luckily, there is enough hilarity involving snakes that you will still love snakes after the movie.  
• Learning the black arts involves passing boxes back and forth between your hands and picking up bottles off of desks, says this film. This is sacrosanct fact in the school of evil wizards.  
• In Hell the demons will grab your mullet, and they will tug on it as they whip you! It's all you deserve for growing the fucking thing. That's probably why you went to Hell to begin with.
• For some reason Renny uses a lot of paired nouns in his expositions voiceovers, specifically ones refer to Bad Shit. "Violence and bloodshed," "bloodshed and death," "corruption and wickedness." It forms its own weird meter that quickly becomes funny, in both senses of that word.

That's it, really. It is a short film, which perhaps pushes me into the Hyper Happy regions--if you take out the credits it's about a minute over an hour. That shortness probably points to one of the things that makes Bad Magic great: its poverty. I sincerely suspect Renny's two-dollar bribe was the sum of what they used to make this, and because there was no money involved there was also no reason not to take risks and go bananas. And take those banana-gone risks the filmmakers did, unleashing a demon unto the world like the characters they chronicled. The only pitfall here is some slight boredom and padding--that is what drags it below Splatter Farm for me, though Splatter Farm certainly slows down sometimes.

The Polonias will undoubtedly return. Sometime soon we'll see Splatter Farm and perhaps another old gem, Night Crawlers. But don't make me choose between them! The Polonia films are all precious. If these movies were taken from me by someone, I, too, would commit Renny's sins, and spectral revenge would be upon the thieves for the awful thing they did.