Clive Barker’s Underworld
Pepperdine runs a high class establishment, champagne served to the businessmen waiting below while upstairs are the girls, among them Nicole and Bianca, elegant, sophisticated, their makeup and clothing perfect, but there are also secrets and another level beneath, the sewers beneath the London docklands the Underworld inhabited by those who have hidden themselves from society.
Rejects, outsiders, and drug addicts, they have been mutated by lactothiozine, the experimental hallucinogenic painkiller known on the streets as White Man developed by Doctor Savary, only Nicole apparently immune to the side-effects though strange dreams have taken root in her mind; kidnapped as leverage, her former lover Roy Bain is summoned to an audience with gangster Hugo Motherskille and told he must find her.
A British thriller with a twist of body horror which received limited release in 1985, apparently a time when cars would explode at the smallest provocation and if your interior decor wasn’t at least 80% plastic you were out of touch, Underworld was the first screenplay credited to Clive Barker, a rising voice in horror at the time following the success of his short story anthologies The Books of Blood, directed by George Pavlou who would later collaborate again with Barker on their adaptation of Rawhead Rex.
Retitled Transmutations for the American release, it is an ambitious film let down by the budget, the limitations obvious in every aspect of the none-more-eighties production, alleyways and fire escapes lit in neon, boudoirs painted in washes of psychedelic colour, floor-length net curtains billowing in the wind, patterns printed on every oversized costume and hair colours straight out of the ZX Spectrum palette while the strip club looks like Hot Gossip making rent after Kenny Everett got axed.
Bain played by Larry Lamb sporting a blown-dry red badger on his head, at fully twenty years older than Nicola Cowper’s late teens Nicole there is immediate ick factor in their relationship, not helped by his absolute absence of charisma, lumbering along in perpetual confusion looking like he got dressed in the dark that morning, while Denholm Elliott rolls his eyes as Savary in the manner of someone aware he is slumming it and Steven Berkoff shouts a lot as Motherskille.
Henchmen Art Malik and Brian Croucher carrying the threat of teddy bears deprived of their picnic, Miranda Richardson does her best in a small part, while Ingrid Pitt’s electric blue hair is wasted as Pepperdine, Underworld most interesting in how much of the shape of Barker’s later film Nightbreed is already in place, a hidden realm of the tortured and unwanted who live on the extreme fringes and clash with the “normals” who despise them, though lacking an effective champion to stand for them the film never finds its feet.
Clive Barker’s Underworld will be streaming on the Arrow platform from Friday 13th February
