STREAM THIS: Cast A Deadly Spell

I get a funny feeling when I watch the delightfully oddball Cast A Deadly Spell—a sneaking suspicion that I’m dreaming or privy to a secret transmission. In memory, the inkling lingers. Was that a real movie that I actually watched, or did my brain make something up? Could it be a Candle Cove situation? Or an instance of the Mandela Effect, like Sinbad’s Shazaam?

Perhaps it’s the curse of the made-for-TV movie to be perpetually misremembered. The sudden availability of ancient Disney Channel original movies on Disney+ is a testament to this. I imagine that part of the reason is this: only recently, with the rise of original streaming award-winners, have we begun to take straight-to-TV movies seriously from a critical standpoint. 

Without contemporaneous reviews in time-tested, wide-reaching media outlets, the straight-to-TV content of yesteryear lacks a certain concrete web presence. Reviews beget views beget list inclusion (canonical or otherwise) beget permanence. Without said reviews, that straight-to-TV content became something akin to urban legend. 

Cast A Deadly Spell premiered on HBO in 1991. The film was produced on a budget of 6 million USD, directed from an old script greenlit after the blockbuster success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It’s since knocked around the network at odd hours, on-and-off for nearly 30 years.

I have never knowingly talked to someone else who remembers it.

The festivities begin with the sleekest info dump I have ever seen, something like the opposite of Johnny Mnemonic:

Our protagonist is Philip Marlowe stand-in Harry Phillip Lovecraft (a cool Fred Ward), and what follows is an amalgamation of Raymond Chandler’s better-remembered plots, only with elements of classic fantasy substituted for color and violence (some Lovecraftian, most not). 

Like Marlowe, what sets Lovecraft apart from the rest of the characters is his moral compass. But where Marlowe won’t take bribes, Lovecraft refuses to use magic. (Neither can stand to be in anyone else’s pocket.) 

The story starts, as it ends, with Lovecraft letting a beautiful woman get booked. Another case wrapped up, he and goofy counterpart Detective Grimaldi light a cigarette —Grimaldi with magic and Lovecraft the old-fashioned way (if you can count using strike-anywheres on a zombie's forehead “old-fashioned”). 

“Same old Schlubcraft,” Grimaldi calls after him as he exits down a sunrise alley, “Same sour outlook, same stubborn streak. And you still wear that dog-puke tie!” (Lovecraft’s ugly watercolor tie becomes a running joke throughout the film.)

His next case is a doozy: a rich eccentric (a very “Jonathan Pryce” David Warner) hires Lovecraft to hunt down a stolen artifact within the next 36 hours—the fabled Necronomicon. As in The Big Sleep, the eccentric’s driver is missing, and his daughter, acolyte of Diana and last of the unicorn hunters, is keen to get involved. 

Though the forecast calls for literal blood, Lovecraft sets out to find the driver, starting at a pocket-world night club run by his former partner. The night club’s other key feature? The singer is his jaw-dropping ex-lover and pitch-perfect femme fatale Julianne Moore.

Like Marlowe, Lovecraft wants justice above all. (Well, he’s also behind on rent.) In his way stands everyone we’ve mentioned so far plus a diner soup demon, a gargoyle shadow, towering zombies, and the perpetually awesome Raymond O'Connor—armed with a slew of spells including a killer tornado of news clippings. 

The story plays something like Jonathan Lethem’s Carver-riff, Gun, with Occasional Music by way of the aforementioned Roger Rabbit. Though Cast A Deadly Spell was released in 1991, I would like to proclaim it an honorary ’80s movie. Its qualifications include genre wackiness, commitment to world-building, and the kind of confident camerawork and budget-driven practical effects worthy of (and indebted to) old-school Carpenter, Gilliam, and Burton. 

Like all noirs, the actors are charged to deliver tough nothings quick and with as much sexual tension as possible. To work, the banter needs to alternately seduce and kill. 

It does. 

Sadly not streaming is the uneven 1994 sequel Witch Hunt, wherein the actual Paul Schrader shuffles the new Lovecraft (a somnambulant Dennis Hopper) through a dumb funhouse of CGI gags. If you must have the “bad movie” version of this fantasy/Chandler mash-up, you can probably find it on Dailymotion or something.

Anyways, Cast A Deadly Spell is perfect for a late-night fall-asleep flick. And if you wake up in a neon-shadowed hallway, poke open your unlatched office door, and hear Julianne Moore’s syrupy voice say, “Stick ‘em up”— don’t worry, you’re not dreaming.