The first three minutes of “Intercessor” will be the most unintentionally funny you’ve seen in quite some time. Mostly because it takes itself so seriously, and is a loud, screeching heavy metal opening.
Someone really needed to tell John Mikl Thor that heavy metal movies pretty much died out before 1990 reared its head, and in the light of 2005, FIFTEEN YEARS LATER, it just looks (and sounds) horribly dated.
I mean, let’s face it, folks…if Def Leppard got within six feet of Marilyn Manson back then, they’d probably wet themselves in terror and run screaming for their mommies.
That and the industry pretty much gave up on heavy metal horror as a bad idea after the wreckage that was “Slaughterhouse Rock” back in the eighties.
So what we have here is the long and convoluted story a war among the demonic sorts, a battle with a psuedoangelic hero, and a handicapped guy just trying to get somewhere in life, and get some along the way via the rather hot neighbor girl.
And trust me, folks…you are in for a LAUGH RIOT on this one.
Even more comical than the plot itself, “Intercessor” seems to have been shot in legendary CamCorderVision ™. It really does look like a bunch of guys got together on the strength of a weekend and a LOT of beer and filmed themselves a movie. It just screams amateurish. The special effects look like Halloween masks and chocolate syrup. There’s one guy who’s dressed up almost exactly like Cheech did in the video for “Get Out of My Room”. The character “War” sounds like a bad Lee Ermey impersonator. The Intercessor can’t even keep the main character’s name straight, screaming “TERRY!” as our main character, Harry, drops into a fiery pit.
I can’t believe no one caught that in editing.
I honestly wonder how seriously we’re supposed to take this. Every character in “Intercessor”, from the stringy goths and mulletheads and abrasive fat aunts in curlers who drink tea and sew nonstop, is almost a caricature of a real person.
Instead of “Another Rock and Roll Nightmare”, it should’ve been subtitled, “A Blueprint For a Cliche Farm”!
Folks, it’s a bad sign when the six year old girl with almost no lines, Melissa Ellingham, is the best actress in the movie.
When “Intercessor” isn’t being trite or unintentionally comical, it’s being downright incoherent. The first twenty minutes feature brief flashes of comic strip art that try to give a kind of backstory, but more often than not, these comic strip flashes amount to little more than non sequiturs, introducing new events with no explanation or even sense of place in the plot.
The script must read like a seventh-grader’s short fiction. “And then this happened. And then THIS! And then the Intercessor gets in a fight with a couple guys and kicks butt! And then some chick gets her SHIRT RIPPED OFF! Yeah, and we see BOOBIES!”
It’s not that great a movie by itself…but man, in terms of sheer unintentional comedy, I never spent more time laughing at a movie than I did laughing at “Intercessor”. Genuinely, I spent SO much time laughing my head off at “Intercessor”, I almost didn’t notice just how purely lousy it was.
If it weren’t for the unintentional comedy, I’d be lambasting “Intercessor” up one side and down the other for being an insult to the genre.
The ending Features some of the most laugh-out-loud stupid fight sequences I’ve ever seen. And even worse, it leaves itself open for a sequel.
The special features include a whole bunch of music videos, not surprising given the nature of the movie, a photo slide show, outtakes and deleted scenes.
All in all, yipes. It’s a dated premise coupled with lousy special effects and shoddy production values, but damn, is it FUNNY!! The problem, of course, is that it isn’t supposed to be funny.
