Verdict
Summary
At only 87 minutes with lots of credits, Netherworld is one of the more befuddling efforts from Full Moon during the era when they were still producing features of quality. The movie has some good gore and makeup effects, but the plot is so strange and the film’s execution is so bewildering that it sometimes feels like two movies in one. Full Moon’s new Blu-ray release of Netherworld offers the film in nice high definition for the first time in the widescreen format, which is the real selling point here, especially if you’re a purveyor and a fan of the Full Moon catalogue.
Plot:
After inheriting his father’s lavish estate, a young man is lured into a bizarre supernatural underworld.
Review:
After his estranged father is found dead in a local whorehouse near his lavish Louisiana estate on a sprawling bayou parish, young Corey Thornton (Michael Bendetti) shows up, not realizing how impressive his inheritance will end up being. With a live-in caretaker (Anjanette Comer) whose cute blonde jailbait daughter Diane (Holly Floria) takes an immediate shine to him, the estate comes with some hidden, but very dark secrets. The caretaker uses some kind of dark magic to ward off bad vibes from the place, but because Corey’s father dabbled in forbidden sorcery, the estate is now cursed with a penchant for allowing a witch (or something) to haunt Corey’s dreams. The witch is the sultry Dolores (Denise Gentile) who operates as a prostitute at the whorehouse nearby, and in a letter Corey’s father left for him, he detailed his sexual relationship with her. Corey – against the caretaker’s warnings – visits the whorehouse and immediately finds himself entranced by Dolores and some of the other odd ladies who work there (one claims to be the real Marilyn Monroe, but it’s obvious she’s not), and we’ve already seen the fate of several men who got out of hand, so to speak, with the women, resulting in gruesome but bizarre fates when a disembodied hand from the netherworld jumps out at them and crushes their skulls to pulp and transforming them into … birds! When Corey gets mixed up with Dolores and sleeps with her, he begins finding feathers growing out of his scalp, signaling his doom. But before he can become one of the netherworld’s next man-to-bird transformations, he embarks on a forbidden quest to revive his father from the dead, using dark magic that only Dolores can conjure up …
At only 87 minutes with lots of credits, Netherworld is one of the more befuddling efforts from Full Moon during the era when they were still producing features of quality. The movie has some good gore and makeup effects, but the plot is so strange and the film’s execution is so bewildering that it sometimes feels like two movies in one. At times it’s reminiscent of the original Phantasm, but other times it’s like a weird sexploitation movie that doesn’t go far enough into the sex genre to satisfy those looking for what they’re after. Written and directed by David Schmoeller, it feels as if he’d been given a piece of poster artwork to create whatever script he wanted as long as it followed a strict budget and as long as he used the disembodied hand as a prop, and if that was the case (which is very likely it might’ve been), then I suppose he delivered more or less what the task required.
Full Moon’s new Blu-ray release of Netherworld offers the film in nice high definition for the first time in the widescreen format, which is the real selling point here, especially if you’re a purveyor and a fan of the Full Moon catalogue. Included on the sic is the original “Videozone” behind the scenes feature, plus trailer.
