
In 1985, after a successful research in Amazonas, Dr. Dennis Alan from Harvard is invited by the president of a Boston pharmaceutics industry, Andrew Cassedy, to travel to Haiti to investigate the case of a man named Christophe that died in 1978 and has apparently returned to life. Andrew wants samples of the voodoo drug that was used in Christophe to be tested with the intention of producing a powerful anesthetic. Dr. Alan travels to meet Dr. Marielle Duchamp that is treatin... (Full plot summary below)
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In 1985, after a successful research in Amazonas, Dr. Dennis Alan from Harvard is invited by the president of a Boston pharmaceutics industry, Andrew Cassedy, to travel to Haiti to investigate the case of a man named Christophe that died in 1978 and has apparently returned to life. Andrew wants samples of the voodoo drug that was used in Christophe to be tested with the intention of producing a powerful anesthetic. Dr. Alan travels to meet Dr. Marielle Duchamp that is treating Christophe and arrives in Haiti in a period of revolution. Soon Alan is threatened by the chief of the feared Tonton Macuse Dargent Peytraud, who is a torturer and powerful witch. Alan learns that death is not the end in the beginning of his journey to hell.
Leave your thoughts about The Serpent and the Rainbow.
| Chicago ReaderJonathan RosenbaumGenuinely frightening...it's nice for a change to see some of the virtues of old-fashioned horror films—moody dream sequences, unsettling poetic images, and passages that suggest more than they show—rather than the usual splatter shocks and special effects (far from absent, but employed with relative economy). |
| Los Angeles TimesKevin ThomasThe Serpent and the Rainbow does for the old Caribbean zombie movie what Steven Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" did for the serials. It preserves all the spooky fun of a movie like "White Zombie" while drawing upon all the sophisticated resources of big-budget modern film making: richly photographed authentic locales, wondrous special effects and amazingly acute sound recording...The result is an ambitious, entertaining--though not flawless--feat of the imagination, a highly visual and skillful blending of supernatural and political terror, high adventure and anthropology. |
| Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertThe Serpent and the Rainbow is uncanny in the way it takes the most lurid images and makes them plausible. |
| Washington PostDesson ThomsonApart from moments of conventional schlock (the ending included), "Serpent" twists with expertly drawn menace. The editing's snappy, the images visceral, and Craven's Haiti is a craze of blood ceremonies and political rioting -- it's set during the fall of "Baby Doc" Duvalier. |
| Chicago TribuneDave KehrMingling a frank trashiness with unexpected ambition, Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow emerges as one of the more commanding horror movies of recent months. |
| VarietyVariety StaffOffers a few good scares but gets bogged down in special effects. |
| Juicy CerebellumAlex SandellWes Craven chiller that thinks it's ten times the picture it actually is. |
| Ozus' World Movie ReviewsDennis SchwartzA solid supernatural voodoo chiller that finely mixes fantasy with real terror to provide the required horror pic scares. |
| EmpireMark DinningEntertaining and ambitious horror hokum, slightly tarnished by a disappointingly obvious "shock" ending. |
| Film InquiryMichelle SabatoMixing religious beliefs with real life zombies is a mixture that could have turned hokey real quick. And adding the political strife into the plot made the story somehow relatable or at least identifiable. |