Deathkeeper
This Australian horror film falls into the occasional demon/angel eternal battle sub-genre of The Prophecy (and sequels), Legion and Tales From the Crypt Presents Demon Knight but is a lot more low-key than the usual entry in these stakes … holding back from anything which might be described as ‘Biblical proportions’.
It opens with a white-bearded ‘Old Luke’ (Danny Brown) shooting dead a guy tied to a chair and morphing into a young blackbearded gloom merchant (Charles Cottier) and a narration more or less explaining his deal amid some scrappy millennium-ago knights in armour battles with demon monks. Luke, despite his name, is sort of an angel and his gig is fighting demons on Earth – he also has a healing touch, which reverts him to his aged form and he can only get back his eternal youth by killing someone (presumably a bad person). Malagor (George Pullar) is Luke’s opposite number, a demon who waltzes around picking on people, hypnotising and enslaving them as living furniture or sex toys and empowering them to battle the fairly skimpy forces of good who are on Luke’s side – a cop (Peter Thurnwald) and a priest (Matthew Caffoe).
All these folk convene in a small town and a random woman (Isabella Procida) gets caught in the middle of the cosmic battle. It’s reasonably well-acted – Brown and Cottier do a good job of matching their performances and Procida makes something of a thinly-written heroine role – and has a couple of effective sequences, mostly with angels or demons teaching mortals lessons in subjugation or violence, but is hampered by tackling such a big theme on such a small scale. Scripted by Sandra Sciberras, Caleb Sciberras Scott and director Tristan Barr, based on a ‘series of novellas’ by Vasilios Bouzas – which suggests it’d like to be a franchise. Maybe go bigger next time.
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