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The Alchemist (1981)

Director: Charles Band

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From Time Out Film Guide

One of a host of movies sold on the back of the ultra-gross(ing) The Exterminator. The connection here is Ginty, a potato-head mumbler with a passing resemblance to Lon Chaney Jr. So too, its familiar plot owes much to the werewolf genre. Ginty is the victim of a century-old curse that keeps him young but means he goes on the blood-trail nightly (sans make-up: costly stuff, hair). Its other debt (Chaney again) is to Mummy movies, with a reincarnated lover drawn into the plot in a battered but still handsome red-and-white Plymouth that's a ringer for Stephen King's Christine. The auto and some amusingly inept demons - whack 'em with a tyre iron, they're out for the count - must be considered the highspots in this spectacularly low-energy multi-pastiche.

Author: GD

Time Out Film Guide


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