Director – David Schmoeller, Screenplay – Billy Chicago [David Schmoeller], Story – Charles Band & Billy Chicago, Producer – Thomas Bradford, Photography – Adolfo Bartoli, Music – David Bryan with Larry Fast/Synergy, Makeup Effects – Mark Shostrom, Flying Hand Effects Designed and Created by Steve Patino S.P.F.X. (Supervisor – Steve Patino), Production Design – Billy Jett. Production Company – Full Moon Entertainment.
Cast
Michael Bendetti (Corey Thornton), Denise Gentile (Delores), Holly Floria (Diane Palmer), Robert Burr (Beauregard Yates, Esq.), Anjanette Comer (Mrs Palmer), George Kelly (Bijou), Alex Datcher (Mary Magdalene), Robert Sampson (Noah Thornton), Holly Butler (Marilyn Monroe), Mark Kemble (Barbusoir)
Plot
Corey Thornton inherits a plantation house in rural Louisiana following the death of the father he barely knew. As he settles in to take over the estate, Corey befriends Diane Palmer, the sultry teenage daughter of his housekeeper. He reads the journal his father left him in which he implores Corey to conduct the voodoo rites that will allow him to come back from the dead. Diane warns Corey away from Tonk’s Place, the brothel across the river where Corey’s father met his death. Ignoring the warning, Corey ventures in to discover a world of exotic pleasures and voodoo rites.
Netherworld was one of the films from Full Moon Productions, a company set up by producer Charles Band and his father Albert as successor to their earlier Empire production company. With Full Moon and Empire, the Bands generated a prolific output of low-budget genre films throughout the 1990s and 2000s, including entire series such as the Ghoulies, Subspecies, Trancers, Gingerdead Man and Evil Bong films, among others. David Schmoeller was one of the Bands’ regular directors, his biggest hit having been the original Puppetmaster (1989), to which Full Moon are still producing sequels. (See below for David Schmoeller’s other genre films).
Full Moon and Empire’s output during their heyday of the 1980s and 90s was full of fascinating oddities. Frequently they struck out but sometimes they produced oddball low-budget works that did something unique as with the likes of Re-Animator (1985), Trancers (1985) and Zone Troopers (1986). Netherworld is one of these fascinating oddities.
The usual Band low-budget appears to have been sufficient here to create an antebellum mansion that looks lush in its layout. The film is full of smouldering sexuality, none more so than the impossibly handsome lead Michael Bendetti. Schmoeller creates a beguiling atmosphere, particularly when it comes to the introduction of Holly Floria, who Bendetti is immediately warned is jailbait. Only a few scenes later, she turns up in the study where her dialogue is filled with come-ons like “I might just be trouble for you” and “I have been known to lust after older men.” Later, the mysterious Delores (Denise Gentile) turns up in the study and appears to lure Michael Bendetti away from his body. At the same time, Bendetti is reading from the diary left by his father where he is pleading for his help in conducting a resurrection spell.
Michael Bendetti is tempted by Denise Gentile
One of the more unusual touches is the brothel of exotic teases. Michael Bendetti is warned away from visiting it and naturally ignores this to venture inside, finding a world of exotica – a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, Alex Datcher who calls herself Mary Magdalene, figures in rotator masks and the bullying local Bijou (George Kelly), among others. Not to mention a petrified hand on a wall that comes to life and flies through the hallways to attack people, not unlike the sphere in Phantasm (1979). Or the opening scenes where one victim appears to have been turned into the equivalent of the cockatoo in a birdcage.
With his low-budget, Schmoeller creates an interesting and absorbing atmosphere. At times, Netherworld has the feel of a low-budget attempt to replicate something of the exotic chiaroscuro of the films of Zalman King – Two Moon Junction (1988), Wild Orchid (1989), Lake Consequence (1993). As with several of the Full Moon/Empire films of this period, the film’s failing is that it contains a fantastic build-up but falls apart in a fairly perfunctory third act and wrap-up of the drama, which it seems to almost consider an afterthought.
Director David Schmoeller has made a number of other genre films, many of these for the Bands. These include the strange Tourist Trap (1979) about a backwoods motelier and his living mannequins, the stalker thriller The Seduction (1982), the psycho film Crawlspace (1986), Catacombs (1988), Puppetmaster (1989), the alien vampire film The Arrival (1991) and the children’s films The Secret Kingdom (1997), Search for the Jewel of Polaris: Mysterious Museum (1999) and Little Monsters (2012).
