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The 90s proved to be anything but a choice year for the once ubiquitous TA-strewn slasher flick, now already being regarded as an anachronism overripe for parody, so the latterly popular, rabidly ‘top-popping’ genre had to evolve or die like so many hard bodied, bikini-clad screamers before it! Writer/director Robert Resnikoff proved himself a post-modernist B-Movie alchemist by fitfully fusing two expired genre tropes in the hope of revivifying the somnolent slasher beast and, to his eternal credit his gnarly satanic slasher ‘The First Power’ (1990) is both grindhouse throwback and a grisly glimmer of horror’s new dawn.
As an especially gruesome swathe of far from random occult killings predictably stir up the murder-hungry media into a sensationalist feeding frenzy, the heroically handsome, hot-blooded, take-no-shizz detective Logan (Lou Diamond Phillips) and fearless n’feisty, red-headed, real-deal psychic Tess (Tracy Griffith) are both soon diabolically drawn into this increasingly malefic labyrinth of infernally borne insanity. These exceptionally brutal ritual killings, psychotically authored by ‘The Pentagram Killer’ (Jeff Kober) a hyena cackling, Aerosmith-looking, maniacally ‘mumbo-jumbo-ing’, flesh carving, body-hopping, blithely blaspheming bugaboo, hatefully hell-bent on raising some immortally unrighteous hell in the city of angels!
Resnikoff’s fabulously frantic ‘The First Power’, even its blood-mottled, sleeve-wearing debt to ancient splatter movie lore and retrograde maverick cop/serial killer schmear, miraculously proves to be an exhilarating descent into satanic slaughter! Aesthetically the film looks terrific, featuring bravura, vertigo-inducing stunts, kinetic car crash carnage, righteously splashy SPFX by industry legend Ed French (Blood Rage), and the propulsive score of Stuart Copeland remains a truly sublime underrated classic! ‘The First Power’ is one of the all-too rare examples when such a hysterical mishmash of B-genre madness coalesces into something far greater than the meagre sum of its bloodily stitched together parts!
For me the prime power behind the movie’s blackened throne is jumping Jack Slasher, Jeff Kober’s murderously mind-tripping, scandalously skin ripping sadist ‘The Pentagram Killer’, who is a far livelier corpse-maker than lumbering franchise fairies like Mimi-Myers or vapid-Voorhees.
As an especially gruesome swathe of far from random occult killings predictably stir up the murder-hungry media into a sensationalist feeding frenzy, the heroically handsome, hot-blooded, take-no-shizz detective Logan (Lou Diamond Phillips) and fearless n’feisty, red-headed, real-deal psychic Tess (Tracy Griffith) are both soon diabolically drawn into this increasingly malefic labyrinth of infernally borne insanity. These exceptionally brutal ritual killings, psychotically authored by ‘The Pentagram Killer’ (Jeff Kober) a hyena cackling, Aerosmith-looking, maniacally ‘mumbo-jumbo-ing’, flesh carving, body-hopping, blithely blaspheming bugaboo, hatefully hell-bent on raising some immortally unrighteous hell in the city of angels!
Resnikoff’s fabulously frantic ‘The First Power’, even its blood-mottled, sleeve-wearing debt to ancient splatter movie lore and retrograde maverick cop/serial killer schmear, miraculously proves to be an exhilarating descent into satanic slaughter! Aesthetically the film looks terrific, featuring bravura, vertigo-inducing stunts, kinetic car crash carnage, righteously splashy SPFX by industry legend Ed French (Blood Rage), and the propulsive score of Stuart Copeland remains a truly sublime underrated classic! ‘The First Power’ is one of the all-too rare examples when such a hysterical mishmash of B-genre madness coalesces into something far greater than the meagre sum of its bloodily stitched together parts!
For me the prime power behind the movie’s blackened throne is jumping Jack Slasher, Jeff Kober’s murderously mind-tripping, scandalously skin ripping sadist ‘The Pentagram Killer’, who is a far livelier corpse-maker than lumbering franchise fairies like Mimi-Myers or vapid-Voorhees.
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