We look back on practical effects that might have been cheap, but they become appreciated for their aesthetic value and effort, in contrast to CGI now. So it will be with dated CGI, particularly as the decades pass and what was once the new thing becomes ossified into a time-stamped style. Directed by Phillip J. Cook, Despiser (2003) is Stephen King’s The Dark Tower rendered into a late-1990s PC game, expansive polygon vistas and human actors subsumed into a Diablo-esque RPG 3-D open world. The camera zips around like a VR demo, and I loved whenever we transitioned from the human actors filmed in a car, we zoom out to see the CGI-car driving towards a CGI-horizon. When I say CGI, this is not like Star Wars: Attack of the Clones level of animated artistry; this is a rendering of the climax to Spawn that hasn’t fully downloaded for pixelated clarity. And yet is more charming and entertaining than the climax of Spawn, or Attack of the Clones for that matter.
A frustrated artist gets fired from his design job when his asshole boss deletes his latest work. Then he comes home to find his wife is leaving him due to his lack of confidence. So he drives into the night and off a bridge to avoid killing a couple of kids running across the lanes. Cut to him waking up in purgatory which is prowling with “Rag Men,” lost souls controlled by “Shadow Men” who are controlled by the higher demonic power of the “Despiser” who looks like a lizard monster created from the Reboot animated series effects package. The only way to escape this netherworld is to fight on the side of “the man upstairs”, and get conscripted by the human fighters who have been travelling the landscape, including a Bible-quoting WW1 soldier and a Japanese fighter pilot, loaded up with weapons and camping out by fires eating cans of beans. Remember troll dolls? You also get a possessed troll yammering, “You’re gonna die, you’re gonna die!”
Despiser is zero budget enough that scenes that take place in the real world like an office workplace or a hospital bed seem like they’ve been shot in the corner of someone’s bedroom. The lead actor would be someone in a bigger budget movie that would play the part of a newsreader who shows up for a minute screen-time to give a report. And for the score, you’ve got Enigma-style Gregorian chants, the perfect touch for a “spiritual” supernatural action adventure where people get hung upside down on crosses and rag-men flounder listlessly under the sway of a shadowy beast. Ultimately, a passion project ode to realising you have the confidence to paint enough to make an art show…. All you had to do was go to polygon-graphic hell and back!
Clicked play on this thanks to reviews from pd187 and VCR of Death. Stream it on Tubi (of course).
VHS Tracking 