I'm a huge sucker for fictional religions and cults. I was raised with ancient Greek mythology and tend to go nuts whenever a Greek pantheon movie comes out (like the recent, underrated Immortals). I also get a huge kick out of movies that depict Christian cosmology and the dense mythology of Catholocism, however successfully. For my money, the coolest stuff is movies that either tinker with the Catholic mythos (John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, the staggering Giulio Paradisi-Ovidio Assonitis mindscrew The Visitor) or create new mythologies - it should come as no surprise that Ghostbusters is one of my favorite movies. Keeping the latter in mind, The Johnsons was right up my alley and turned out to be a wickedly creative and very fun cult-prophecy horror flick, and probably the only horror movie from the Netherlands you're likely to see.
The movie begins with a narrator telling us of an anthropologist's 1930's expedition to study the Mahxitu tribe in the Amazon. The tribe worshiped Xangadix, a god of pure evil who would beget seven sons who would bring eternal darkness to the world through an incestuous ritual. The professor disappeared, and decades later a trunk of his studies would wind up in Amsterdam, to be unearthed by Surinamese anthropology Professor Keller. 21 years before he does, a Dr. Johnson performs the c-section birth of male septuplets (uh...), complete with a shot inside the womb, and that night goes out to the Biesbosch National Park to smear mud on his face and summon the Embryo of Xangadix (...oh), which rises out of the swamp with fire surrounding it. In the present, the professor examines the expedition materials with no help from his witch doctory father, who tries to destroy any records of Xangadix he can find. He is also rudely tasked by a secret government agency to help deal with seven male siblings (hmm...) who committed a horrible massacre at age 7 and were committed, now at the whim of the state as the sanitarium is being closed. The men never speak and once tore one of the guards apart, drawing symbols on the wall in his blood. Meanwhile, a newspaper photographer is assigned to try to photograph the rare night heron in the Biesbosch, and her nearly 14-year-old daughter tags along. The daughter has been having unsettling dreams involving bald young boys drawing blood symbols on walls, as well as being ritualistically gang-bred by naked men wearing hilarious masks, and not-so-coincidentally she's been worried about how late her first period is becoming. With everything that's been going on she should be a heck of a lot more worried.
While I don't think The Johnsons is truly scary it is really damn fun, and with a movie this nifty fun is a very welcome adjective. This is crowd pleasing stuff - inventive, bloody and action packed - and it's much smarter than your average junk-horror rental. The movie could have sustained itself on its ideas alone, but fortunately for us the acting is top notch and it's very well made, the look rising above its obvious shot-on-video-then-processed-by-Film-Look appearance. While the horror and action is taken seriously it's pretty funny; the narrator at the beginning ends his tale of the doomed expedition by saying "Holy Shit!", and a character kills a villain via TV set, then blows the end of the remote control as if it was a gun barrel. It's the kind of movie Midnight screenings were made for, a dang good time with Guts 'n' Laffs (and the Embryo!) that doesn't overstay its welcome. Anchor Bay released a special edition DVD some years ago, so the next time you've got too much popcorn to eat by yourself round up some friends and give The Johnsons a spin. Just don't ask why there's a garbage strike in Amsterdam that has nothing to do with anything.
~PNK
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