THE TENTH FILM BY QUENTIN TARANTINO: TODD MCFARLANE'S SPAWN

 

BLUMHOUSE FILMS PRESENTS

A MATCH MADE IN DEVELOPMENT HELL

THE TENTH FILM BY QUENTIN TARANTINO

TODD MCFARLANE'S SPAWN

In perhaps the greatest example of "two birds, one stone" one could fathom, Blumhouse has brokered a duet of impossibilities, delivering two long-gestating projects in one fell swoop.

Child-murdering ice cream man Billy Kincaid (Nightbreed's Tony Bluto) is found dead in a alley crawling with rats, viciously dispatched in a fashion that that according to Detective Sam (The Wire's Delaney Williams) can only be performed by a highly trained assassin... or a demon from Hell. "Both, maybe?", quips Detective "Twitch" (John Turturro, calling back to a line from his own Barton Fink). Cutting back and forth between past and present, we watch Kincaid dispose of children's bodies in the same alley, mutilated and wrapped in garbage bags. When he turns to leave the alley, he bumps into a wall of chains, hanging from the power lines between the buildings, Red curtains drop down the walls of the buildings. Kincaid turns around, confused, looking upward to find out just where these items are falling from. He spots a figure... solid black but for a pair of vaporous green eyes. 

We jump into a crackling opening credit sequence set to Curtis Mayfield's "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below We're All Going to Go", where footage from combat zones and urban decay are spliced with mythological imagery of battles taking place in Heaven and Hell. After this, we flashback to five years earlier, where a Black Ops team known as the Shadow Hawks (a nod to Spawn's fellow Image Comics Universe traveler Shadowhawk) are on a deadly mission, It is here that reluctant squad leader Al Simmons (Candyman's Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is betrayed by his squad mates Jessica Priest (One Battle After Another's Teyana Taylor) and Chapel (The First Purge's Rotimi Paul), taken out at the request of their shadowy commanding officer, Jason Wynn (Oldboy's Yoo Ji-tae), after Simmons had uncovered Wynn's connections to a vast human trafficking operation. Simmons remerges five years later in his home of Manhattan, heavily burned, with no memories of the time between now and his assassination. The details of the last half-decade are filled in by grotesque troll of a man nicknamed "Clown" (Human Centipede 2's Lawrence R Harvey, casting a black spell over the bowels as the invariably repulsive goblin envoy, performing a surprisingly spot-on Al Goldstein impression). Simmons died, went to Hell, and was given a finite amount of power to carry out a bloody campaign of revenge on those who wronged him... and maybe send a few more souls down to Hell on the way down such a path, so Hell's "defense secretary" Malebolgia (a creation of stop motion magnificence from Phil Tippet, voiced by Larry Bishop) can swell the ranks of Satan's army... to best wage war on Heaven. Simmons agrees, donning the living armor of a "Hellspawn", but is as reluctant as ever to carry out the violent deeds of men and beasts hiding away in secret rooms. As all of this is unfolding, investigative journalist (and Al Simmons wife) Wanda (Tragedy Girls' Alexandra Shipp) is conducting an investigation of her own, putting her and her new family in the crosshairs of the same forces that had her husband killed. 

A fiendish union of mutually extreme sensibilities, Tarantino reimagines McFarlane's source material in his trademark cinematic collage fashion, liberally borrowing elements from Rolling Thunder, The Golden Bat, Suspiria, Blacula, The Candy Snatchers, and Tetsuo The Iron Man... fusing them with the comic's penchant for gonzo monster opera theatricality, while also drawing from the well of his own filmography (Black Ops Al Simmons betrayed and killed by his teammates Chapel and Jessica Priest and the request of their boss Jason Wynn no doubt echoes Kill Bill, and the dynamic between Spawn and Clown plays like a bad faith iteration of the chummy dynamic between Jamie Foxx and Christoph Walz in Django Unchained). Sensing himself struggling with the more FX heavy sequences involving Harvey's Clown transforming into the spiky kaiju Violator, Tarantino handed those duties to Tippet's crew, who craft a memorable fight sequence between Spawn and Violator that calls to mind the prolonged cyborg battle in Robocop 2. While at first jarring, this transition eventually brings to mind the shift from sundowning hang out piece to gory home invasion thriller in Tarantino's ninth film Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood, so keeping that benefit in mind... not to mention the kitchen sink genre panacea of McFarlane's property... the dichotomy feels more than in tune... it's downright harmonious.