The Spine of Night

Chiming back to the likes of Heavy Metal - the film and magazine - and the distinctive art of Frank Frazetta, writers and directors Morgan Galen King and Philip Gelatt’s Spine of the Night, has all the required touches of a barbarian fantasy with added magic and violence, lots of violence. The witch Tzod (Lucy Lawless) has climbed up a mountain to find her way to the Guardian (Richard E Grant) looking for the last of the blue blooms that the guardian is protecting.

They fall into a conversation that’s overwrought with purple prose (as is the language for much of the film) as the witch describes her story, the destruction of her home and blue flowers that includes much fighting, the ascension to absolute power of one of the scholars Gal-Sur (Jordan Douglas Smith), whom Tzod at first trusts but becomes corrupted, and her death and rebirth, sort of. So what we have are linked stories of the scholar’s rise to ruthless power through the bloom and the Tzod’s attempts to get things back to what they were as well as how the guardian came to be.

These take the form of invasion, fights and battles, spells and magic with bodies skewered and limbs separated liberally from them. It’s a bold quest though there’s not a lot of intellectual rigour here other than the danger and lure of absolute power and that it is more than likely to corrupt than not. The rotoscope animation is quite murky, and looks dated though there are some inspired flashes of imagination and it is not unwatchable.

The main weakness though is the story which is a little muddled and doesn’t quite hold the attention and dialogue that’s is a chore and heavy on the ear. However it’s probably no more than a bridge to the inevitable slaughter and it can’t be overemphasised how much of that there is. Taken with the plentiful nudity this is trippy, lurid stuff though just about does enough to keep the viewer going for the distance.

The Spine of Night is available on Shudder