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DIRECTED BY: Phillip J. Cook

FEATURING: Mark Redfield, Doug Brown, Gage Sheridan, Frank Smith, Michael Weitz, Tara Bilkins, Mark Hyde

PLOT: A near-death experience pulls a down-on-his-luck artist into Purgatory, where a rag-tag team are waging a losing battle against the Despiser.

COMMENTS: Phillip Cook loves action: gunfights and explosions abound. He also loves metaphysics: purgatory is real. He loves, too, hearty doses of ambiguity: is this death-world really purgatory, or just another dimension? Most of all, though, he loves his CGI: its delineations, its vibrancy, its rudimentality—its ubiquity. Despiser will cater to any number of genre enthusiasts, but if you’re not on board with his late ’90s, classic-Windows era aesthetic, you should just keep walking.

Personally, I was fully on board with watching the action-machinations of a gang of do-gooders, who exhaust any amount of bullets, burn any amount of tire tread, and quip any amount of one-liners, as they careen through an uncanny world of angular churches, Day-Glo lava, and boxy sports cars. Despiser‘s backdrop is an odd and exciting one, contrasting greatly with the humdrum doings in the living world of our reluctant hero, Gordon: unmotivated painter, failed graphic designer, and, in the end, savior. His dreams—and a near-death experience or two—may be a flashy, dark, and stripped-down nigh Hellscape, but that sure beats his (and our) ho-hum, beige existence. The visual clash is bold, as observed by Gordon himself: “This place doesn’t look real”, he muses upon arrival. And no, it does not. Thank goodness.

The plot twitches along from action set-piece to action set-piece, with religious overtones not quite saturating the atmosphere. The gun-toting team of righteous actioneers who take Gordon into their fold is led by a wisecracking, scripture-quoting Army Ranger from the turn of the 20th century: Carl Nimbus, who never met a Bible passage he couldn’t twist into a badass threat. Despiser almost comes across as something of a gotta-be-cool Christian movie, but Phillip Cook has it both ways (indeed, he has it several ways). Just when the God-and-Thunder motifs threaten to show their hand, Cook deflates them, most notably when Carl quotes, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—Psalms: 23”. Gordon rejoins, “We’re on a highway to Hell. AC/DC: 1980.” This is not a movie to take entirely seriously.

But the characters do, and that’s key for us being on board with the imaginative nonsense which unravels, re-ravels, and ultimately ends up as an entertaining crochet of in-your-face foolishness, bullet-flying fantasy, and desperate characters going to desperate measures to thwart the titular Despiser. (A being so evil, it could only have been properly voiced by author/producer/director Phillip Cook.) I spent two bucks renting this diversion, but golly if I’m not tempted to buy the modestly priced super-duper Blu-ray. Not to sound too religious here, but it’s a small blessing that this singular cinematic extravaganza (made for video though it was) came around the first time, but also to be released in tip-top form on a disc featuring all the great love for the material that makes Despiser the funtime oddity it is.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… weird, convoluted, all around dumb and yet completely fucking awesome…. [Cook’s] bizarre fetish for low quality CGI and green screens spreads through his entire work history and you gotta respect a guy for sticking to his guns. If you want low budget action that’s determined to be itself and be refuses to take itself anything less than seriously, you’ll love what the guy has to offer…” — Mikey Ward, Mondo Exploito

Despiser [Visual Vengeance Collector's Edition]

• Collector's Edition

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