A crazy, satanic serial killer is on the loose in Los Angeles. Detective Russell Logan (Lou Diamond Phillips) is on the case. Or rather he’s chilling at home when a psychic (Tracy Griffith) calls him up and tells him where the killer’s next victim is going to occur. But she makes him promise that he won’t kill the killer nor will he allow him to get the death penalty.
Our hero gets the killer but he reneges on the deal to not let him get the death penalty. After he gets the gas chamber Detective Logan starts seeing horrific images and hearing the killer’s voice in his head.
The psychic shows up in person to let him know that the killer’s soul is now inhabiting the bodies of others and the killings will continue until they can stop them.
It is Noirvember and as I noted in today’s Daily Bootleg Post I’m gonna be busy watching a bunch of kung-fu movies over the next week or two. It is also Friday and I’m definitely not giving up my Friday Night Horror Movie. So, I was trying to find a way to blend those two things together.
Theoretically, that’s pretty easy to do. Film noir is hard to define and thus the definition is actually pretty flexible. Neo-noir is even more flexible. Both tend to involve crime, often murder. Sometimes serial murder. Horror films generally involve some murder and sometimes those murders are wrapped up in a murder mystery. A little Googling turned up a list of noir/horror hybrids and that’s how I discovered The First Power.
I wanna say I’ve seen this movie before but none of it rang any memory bells and I haven’t logged in on Letterboxd, so who knows. I definitely remember it coming out and wanting to see it.
It isn’t great. I love me some Lou Diamond Phillips. This film comes at the tail end of his first wave of popularity and it doesn’t work that well as a star vehicle for him. The script is pretty hokey, and it doesn’t lean hard enough on the whole satanic angle.
The killer carves pentagrams into his victims and they do bring a nun in at some point, but he’s never really involved in anything demonic. Most of it takes place in the city in broad daylight which is just weird for a horror movie about the occult. There are some scenes in dark warehouses and down in the bowels of the city’s water drainage. It does some nice things with light and shadow in those moments, but they don’t last.
The film posits that the killer’s soul is possessing various other people but it doesn’t really do much with that concept. Mostly we see him in the original body (played by Jeff Kober), but sometimes we see him in the body of whoever he’s possessing. But there are no scares involved in that. There is never any mystery of who he is possessing.
There are a few good, nut-ball moments like when a homeless woman floats in the air, or when the killer jumps off a ten-story roof and survives, or the fact that Los Angeles apparently has a giant boiling cauldron of flammable liquid in the bowels of their water drainage system, but mostly this is a by-the-numbers early 1990s horror/thriller.
themidnightcafe.org 