Pay No Attention to the Previous Events

Look, I try not to get too nitpicky about dumb details in movies. Sometimes it calls for it, such as in the case of all the bad science of Armageddon, a movie too dumb to know any better. Most of the time, though, I really try to just enjoy movies for what they are and forgive little sins here or there. I know that Warlock: The Armageddon is a cheap, rushed into production sequel to a film that only did marginally well on home video and, as such, needs to be judged at a different level from actual, good, professional movies. I get that.

And yet, the opening of the film starts with a lunar eclipse where the moon is blocked by an object the exact size and shape so as to create a moon corona in the sky. This simply cannot happen. Nothing that exists could create this perfect of an eclipse, and an actual lunar eclipse doesn’t work this way because the moon crosses into the much larger shadow of the Earth. My brain simply rebelled at this point and struggled to take anything going on in the film seriously because, sometimes, a movie starts off so poorly it simply can never recover.

I understand that we can’t expect the same level of quality from a Warlock film as we would from a bigger-budget horror franchise. Warlock: The Armageddon is a low-cost sequel to the low-cost film Warlock, and that film was no winner. You take what you can get when you’re watching the sequels to already mediocre movies. But even by the metric set by the first film, this film is all but unwatchable. Warlock, while bad, at least had a cohesive story, a few interesting moments, and some genuinely fun set-pieces. This sequel fails to have any of those moments, and fails at everything else as well. It’s a rough draft of a film that really needed to be anything other than what was actually produced.

In the distant past a group of druids were working to banish the demon son of the Devil from a young woman, taking her to their altar where, upon her body, six magical, runic stones were placed. The ceremony is a success, but as they’re finishing up a group of knights come in, Christians who believe the Druids are working for the Devil, and the group of Druids, despite the good they just performed, are all killed, their stones scattered and lost as the knights take most of them as spoils of battle.

In the present, one woman, who just so happens to have inherited one of the stones, thinking it a necklace, wears it on a date. But before her lover (played for some reason in a quick cameo by Zach Galligan) can arrive, she suddenly becomes very pregnant, very quickly, giving birth to the son of the Devil, the warlock (Julian Sands, once again). Meanwhile, in a small town in California, teen Kenny Travis (Chris Young) really likes the daughter of the local pastor, Samantha Ellison (Paula Marshall), but her father wants to keep them apart. Everyone in town thinks it’s because Kenny’s family are druids, and thus worshippers of Satan. But that’s not true, and now that the son of the Devil is on Earth, collecting the stones so he can raise his father, it’s going to be Kenny and Sam that actually have to fight the evil and save the planet.

The first film, Warlock, was a road trip movie with the heroes of that film chasing after the titular fiend, so they could use him to break a curse and also stop him from unmaking creation. This second film is also a road trip film, but only for the warlock. He gets to ride around, going from place to place (with a map made of human flesh), finding stones and killing people. He’s a kind of Wishmaster wish-fulfillment type, giving people exactly what they ask for with all the monkey’s paw catches you would expect.

This is each of his scenes, over and over, and while it’s amusing for a time, what it really boils down to the warlock showing up somewhere, meeting a few people that are barely sketched out and won’t have any bearing on the larger film, and then he kills them before leaving to go do it again elsewhere. It turns the film into a very random, hard to care about slasher film because while some of the actual kills are okay (some are pretty goofy, mind you, but others are at least decently gory and over-the-top), most of the fun is already sucked out of the film.

The weird thing is that the warlock is the only one actually doing anything in the movie. He has character motivation, he has a quest he’s on, he’s actually fulfilling his goals. He’s the villain of the piece but he actually has some kind of forward momentum. Kenny, the guy that is supposed to be our hero, doesn’t do squat. The warlock is out there, but Kenny’s dad (Steve Kahn) keeps Kenny at home, in their town, so he can “train”. This leads to a few silly montages but the powers he trains on barely come into play by the end of the film. He just sits around and waits for the villain to come to him.

This is a massive miscalculation on the part of the story. It’s fine for the hero and villain to have different paths, but it’s strange that only one of the two characters is actually an active participant in their own story. Kenny doesn’t actually do anything in the film for most of the runtime, sitting around and waiting for the story to come to him (effectively making him the opposite of a protagonist). Sam is even worse, being a very passive love interest until suddenly the film tries to turn her into a co-heroine for Kenny’s hero. Neither of them are engaged in the story like they should be so it drains the fun out of the film from that direction as well.

What the film needed our heroes to do was get introduced to their legacy as druids early, shove them out onto the road to chase down the warlock, and actually make them do anything. Instead we’re left with a film that has to rely on the charms of Sands (of which there are plenty as this was a role he clearly relished playing) to get anything going because the plot is as bad and linear as it can be. I’ve never seen a film that wastes its heroes this badly, and yet here we are with this Warlock sequel.

And while we’re tearing things apart, let’s also note that this film is barely even connected to the previous movie. There the warlock was a nasty evil witch dude looking to unmake creation by speaking the original words of god. Now, instead, he’s the son of Satan, with different magical powers, a different end goal, and a completely different backstory. It’s pretty clear they wanted to make a sequel to the first film (perhaps because Sands was contractually obligated to do so) but they had no ideas about how to bring back the warlock or get him rolling… so they just didn’t bother. Same actor, same name, totally new story. It doesn’t make any sense in context at all.

But then this was a film absolutely riddled with bad choices. Bad acting, bad special effects, bad sound design… the list goes on and on. You notice all of this because the main story is so bad that you end up not paying attention to it while you focus on everything else. I wouldn’t have cared that the special effects were cheesy if I was engaged in the battles going on around them. I wouldn’t have cared that the warlock in this film was basically an all new character if his story were interesting. Hell, I wouldn’t have bitched so much about the eclipse at the start of the film if what came after were delightfully fun (even bad fun can still be fun), but it wasn’t.

Through and through, Warlock: The Armageddon is just a terrible film. It’s a poorly made, cheap cash-in designed to scrape money away from people based on its name alone. Nothing about this film is fun, in any capacity. Even going off of Warlock and how bad that film was, this still rates as one of the worst sequels I’ve ever seen.