The Serpent and the Rainbow

Directed by Wes Craven, The Serpent and the Rainbow follows an American anthropologist (Bill Pullman’s Dennis Alan) as he encounters a series of complications and nefarious figures while investigating a “zombie” drug in Haiti. Filmmaker Craven, armed with Richard Maxwell’s screenplay, delivers an often astonishingly dull and uninvolving endeavor that gets off to a rather disastrous start, as the movie kicks off with a hopelessly tiresome opening stretch that stresses elements of a decidedly underwhelming nature – with the ongoing emphasis on Dennis’ various (and thoroughly tedious) hallucinations certainly ranking high on the picture’s list of disagreeable, arms-length attributes. From there, The Serpent and the Rainbow progresses into a momentum-free midsection that consists entirely of interminable encounters and episodes and it’s clear, certainly, that one’s efforts at connecting to any of this fall flat on a continuous basis. And while the picture admittedly does contain one decent sequence, in which a dinner party goes horrifyingly awry, The Serpent and the Rainbow builds towards an over-the-top yet predictably ineffective climax that ensures it ends on as lackluster a note as one could envision – which does, in the final analysis, cement the whole thing’s place as a mostly worthless piece of work that’s a strong contender for Craven’s very worst film.

1/2* out of ****