What Fresh Hell is This? Weird Wednesday Review of Dark Angel: The Ascent

In this loose but much improved retelling of The Little Mermaid, a curious demon breaks through to the surface of the sinners to discover what she’s missed out on by growing up in Hell. What Dark Angel: The Ascent lacks in Ursula is made up for in spine removals as Angela Featherstone (playing our demoness Veronica) lets loose her sense of justice upon the world. Akin to a motorcycle-less Ghost Rider and evoking a naive Buffy the Vampire Slayer at times–rivaling the beauty of even Nic Cage and Sarah Michelle Gellar–Veronica is a self-assured queen of justice in a miscreant’s world.

Dark Angel arrived straight to video thanks to Full Moon Entertainment (the studio that brought us the Puppet Master and Evil Bong series) from writer Matthew Bright of Freeway and Guncrazy fame, and director Linda Hassani. After this, Hassani would co-direct a Men in Black video for the Universal Studios Florida ride, but her work directing portions of the softcore anthology films Inside Out (not the animated movie) and Inside Out 2 (the former having one of my favorite taglines to date: “… where The Twilight Zone meets the erogenous zone”) helped her secure Dark Angel. With an obvious talent for displaying the female gaze, Hassani empowers Veronica to weaponize that gaze to judge the damned. If looks could kill.

Below this are spoilers for Dark Angel: The Ascent (1994, so, come on).

Demons are devout Christians who worship God by punishing the endless deluge of bankers who have sinned their admission to Hell. Veronica, a younger demon, just isn’t quite content with the family business and yearns to see the world of man, but her family’s quick to remind her that she’s a demon and Hell is her home.

Hell is depicted quite beautifully here, with burning fields and elaborate “underground” sets. Then the extras start lightly flogging each other with a ferocity that could be beaten by toddlers with sticks and the illusion shatters. This was never meant to play on the big screen and there are moments that prove that, but catching Dark Angel with an audience also reinforced its potential for a midnight movie-type revival.

“We can always have more children,” the doting demon parents despair, and her climb begins.

When Veronica breaks her way out of Hell through a manhole and into one of the vaguest human cities to grace the silver screen, she is re-birthed nude and without her horns, wings, or tail. Her first steps in the mortal world are taken through a crowd of stunned onlookers, and she floats in a Spike Lee-esque double dolly shot that just screams “production value!” From here begins a tale of a simple girl finding her place and first love in a sinner’s world.

What Bright and Hassani pull from The Little Mermaid and what they omit allows Veronica to explore her life with a broader sense of agency than Ariel ever could without that glorious flipper. Once she’s out, Veronica is emboldened to find her way with no pressures from her old world, and hell–she doesn’t even have to kiss some hot prince in fear of being dragged back home, she just does that because she wants to.

A German Shepherd roams the streets in pursuit of something unseen. Veronica finds herself in the hospital with superficial wounds and we’re introduced to our Prince Eric, Dr. Max Barris played by Daniel Markel. Stunned by her ethereal beauty and the screams of damned souls in lieu of a heartbeat, Dr. Max is swiftly swept off his feet by this Doc Marten-wearing enigma. Our leading demoness, unbound by social norms and driven by her who-knows-how-long obsession with man, asserts herself to stay at the good doctor’s home. Since she doesn’t have anywhere else to go, of course!

“Where is my beast?” Veronica demands, but the doc can’t help her there and they head to his place. There she objects herself to the 24-hour news cycle and discovers overnight that her purpose in life is to rid the world of evil, with the Mayor himself as evil incarnate. She sets off with clear eyes and a full heart to sweep the town for sinners, quickly affirming her new righteous journey by battling attempted rapists and racist cops. After making quick removal of the rapist’s spine, Veronica dearly offers it to the victim with a simple: “keep this.” She beckons the German Shepherd over and welcomes her hellhound, “Hellraiser,” to consume the flesh of her own victims. Rad.

Cleaning the world of its worst qualities puts her on a pedestal, but making her a demonic fish out of water allows Veronica to be relatable in her new world. She can’t be killing evil-doers all the time, and her original curiosity often takes over as she explores what the town has to offer, like a beautiful church that she just can’t bring herself to enter.

The doctor hears crazy stories from patients that paint a clear enough picture about the woman he so quickly allowed into his home, but hold up! Someone lit 100 candles and the sex scene was summoned. Only asking about the murders in a post-nut clarity, the doctor accepts his new demon girlfriend and her murderous mission with ease (again, this is a doctor). As the movie begins to reveal how Veronica corrupts those around her, a messenger from heaven arrives in a bubble not dissimilar to Glinda’s to tell Veronica’s parents that God is very impressed by their daughter’s de-spining of rapists and that they should be super proud of her. God didn’t have to do that, but He did.

Dark Angel delivers camp and heart aplenty, but just when you think you’ve found its depths, another loop is added to the rollercoaster in the form of an investigation into the local killings by actually competent detectives. In one scene the detectives are led to Veronica via legitimate evidence, but surely this tiny little angel-faced girl couldn’t have savagely eviscerated the victims, right? She doesn’t hide her innocence but rather questions theirs–are they loyal to the Mayor? With signs on each victim pointing towards the Mayor as a future target, the lead detective realizes that the discussion has quickly devolved from an investigation to a trial for his own life; whose living room did he walk into?

Sometimes wooden but always striking, Angela Featherstone deserves a Dark Angel franchise that never arrived. With Giallo lighting and gore to live up to the genre, this weird mix of romance, fantasy, and religion has enough to offer anyone willing to find it. In just 82 minutes Veronica the demoness becomes an icon, an inspiration, possibly canonized(??), and delivers the Penance Stare over a decade before Nic Cage, but that doesn’t hold her back from finding love like us common folk. This reviewer is hard-pressed to find anything more romantic than telling your demon girlfriend that you’ll commit as much evil as possible just to see her again.