Clive Barker’s weakness as a director is that he doesn’t make any sense.
His strength as a director is that he doesn’t CARE that he doesn’t make any sense.
There’s ambition behind this story of an underground community of monsters in a small town. This isn’t another exploitation job or gross-out flick. Barker seeks to flip the table on your typical monster movie. He depicts his grotesques as a persecuted minority. They’re peace-loving people who just happen to sometimes look like mutated fish and demonic porcupines and who might have creepy hieroglyphics all over their skin.
Where things fall apart is that Barker doesn’t know how to draw out characters on screen. He adapts his novel like it’s a comic book version. His characters merely follow a script and the actors don’t get room to breathe. We look at them like they’re strangers for the whole film—and not in a good way. It’s no wonder that the best performance here comes from a non-actor, David Cronenberg who sports an impressive head of hair and glowers memorably as one psycho psychiatrist.
There is a fan following for this, though. It’s largely made up of Barker’s readers who can discern the vision in the mess. Those admirers did not include 20th Century Fox who, according to Barker, didn’t understand the film and usurped final cut, chopped the soul out of it and then left it for dead in theaters where they attempted to sell it as a slasher film (which it definitely isn’t). Almost twenty years later, an extended version, nicknamed The Cabal Cut, saw light of day through screenings at horror conventions. That lead to a further refined Director’s Cut (which is what I saw and review here) released on a Blu-Ray that sold quickly to the cult.