Red Spell Spells Red

It’s frustrating, watching a film that desperately wants to be several other movies at once, like a dinner guest who tells the same stories you’ve already heard, but tells them badly. Red Spell Spells Red is such a film—a Hong Kong horror picture that seems to have been assembled from a checklist of what worked in other people’s movies, without any understanding of why those elements worked in the first place.

The story, such as it is, follows a documentary crew from Hong Kong to Malaysia, where they manage to unleash something called the Red Dwarf ghost. The ghost follows them to Borneo and begins the obligatory process of picking them off one by one. But the creators seem less interested in telling this story than in recreating moments from a dozen other films.

Here we have the low, prowling camera work of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, but without Raimi’s manic energy or his understanding that horror and comedy can amplify each other. We get the exotic menace and animal slaughter of Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, but without that film’s disturbing commitment to its own bleak vision. There are scorpions everywhere, apparently because someone saw Calamity of Snakes and thought more was better. Even The Omen gets pillaged for its Latin chorus, which fits as well as Gregory Peck would in the cast.

The saying “good artists copy, great artists steal” proves apt here. The fundamental problem with Red Spell Spells Red is that it commits to none of its copied ideas. It wants to be a gross-out horror film but pulls back from truly nauseating moments. It wants to be a supernatural thriller but can’t decide whether its ghost is real or hallucinatory. In one particularly frustrating sequence, we watch the film’s producer struggle against possessed editing equipment that strangles him with film stock and grinds his hand to bone on a spinning wheel—a genuinely inventive and gruesome scene—only to have the film reveal it as a dream sequence, apparently because the filmmakers lost their nerve—or perhaps they realized they needed that character for the finale.

The aforementioned timidity extends to the film’s abrupt ending, which simply freeze-frames in what feels like the middle of a scene. One suspects the money ran out before the ideas did, though given the poverty of ideas on display, this may have been a mercy.

The film does achieve one moment of genuine spectacle in its finale, where actress Poon Lai-Yin finds herself tied to a water wheel, cranked through cycles of submersion and exposure while wearing a strategically transparent white shirt. It’s exploitative filmmaking in its purest form, and for viewers seeking exactly that, it may justify the preceding 80 minutes. But such moments cannot redeem a film that fundamentally misunderstands what made its influences effective.

The Evil Dead worked because Raimi understood that watching someone struggle against invisible forces can be hilarious if played with the right mixture of commitment and absurdity. Bruce Campbell sold those scenes through sheer force of personality and physical comedy. Poon Lai-Yin, whatever her other qualities, lacks Campbell’s gift for making the ridiculous seem heroic.

Red Spell Spells Red is the cinematic equivalent of a covers band that has learned all the notes but none of the music. It will find its audience among the less discriminating consumers of exploitation cinema, but even they deserve better than this halfhearted pastiche of superior films.