Henry (John Tench) escapes the abuse of his preacher father and heads into the city. The impressionable dimwit quickly joins a gang and gets busted pulling a job for them. After doing a year in jail, he is released and meets a drifter (Peter Read) who wears a priest's collar who promises him the world. Rule #1 regarding drifters: if they tattoo a pentagram on you, they are bad news. Henry becomes a rock hard badass who is somehow Satan and gets revenge on everyone who ever wronged him (including some guys who beat him playing pool). The devil don't mess around. An hour in the film takes a complete shift as private detective Sam (Paul Amato) and psychic Lisa (Tracy Hoyt) get involved after the cop who busted Henry is impaled by random glass falling out of the sky. They soon find that Henry has impregnated his old girlfriend and this pisses the drifter off since he can't take over the world if Henry has a kid. This is one odd flick that kind of feels like one of those Jack Van Impe religious flicks but with gore. Not much else I can really say about it. I don't think it ever got a VHS release in the US.
3 Reviews
Odd little occult revenge obscurity
Bloodwank25 March 2011
A weird one, this. Only three IMDb reviews and no information to be found on it anywhere else, very much the sort of film I would expect to be running into on the interweb rather than a market stall, yet sure enough it got a release on both video and DVD in the UK (though seemingly to little avail as the lack of protesters complaining that it wasn't worth the pound they spent on it indicates). It would even seem to warrant its own obscurity, being a little tricky to pin down but ultimately makes for an easy, occasionally effective watch. In some ways it seems to be a sort of modern day parable, being that the story is of Henry, an abused and betrayed down and out young man granted supernatural power to smite his enemies by an agent of the Devil. But then Henry's bad times seem to start with is stepfather, an abusive man of god. Also the climax is put in motion by a psychic of unmentioned affiliations, which doesn't really seem to me the wisest choice for a message film. And the devilish emissary doesn't have much to do, nor are many trappings of devilishness present (the odd pentagram but not much more). For much of the time its a revenge film with Henry killing or at least maiming a goodly number of people, and here is where the oddness is most apparent. For a while Henry seems to operate in a vacum, getting away with a good deal of bad behaviour often either in public or at least out in the open without anybody either trying to put a stop to him or calling the police, indeed the police only get in on the action when they feel a personal slight. Perhaps the film is trying to say something about the uncaring nature of modern day city life, about social division and law enforcement? Furthering the oddness is the structure of the film which tends to eschew the connective tissue of character development or plot, giving only scraps to hold things together with some tattered semblance of momentum (on at least one occasion this results to the film leaping through time in a head spinning but unmentioned manner). The violence has its kooky moments too, nearly always quite mean and sometimes funny but generally lacking in much gore (though some blood is usually spilt). So then, a film that doesn't quite pull off any of the things it seems to be attempting, it should be a dog but somehow it holds the attention. Partly its Henry, as played by the unremarkable John Tench he starts out sympathetic but shakes it soon enough, gradually building from a sort of bland, niggling unlikability to a point where he actually comes off kinda hateful. Though underused, Peter Read has a good low key menace as the Drifter, Henry's recruiter. The rest of the cast fill their parts well enough but make little of an impression, outside of the principals hardly any are even named. They bring a sort of authenticity with their rough hewn turns though, making for the right sort of grimy, depressing atmosphere. The atmosphere is aided greatly by the gritty cinematography (by the clearly hard working Gilles Corbeil who also co wrote and co produced the film), it gives the Toronto locations a certain mean edge and I've always been a fan of this sort of approach to city life. The swift pace is a bonus too, something of interest is always either happening or just around the corner and the shenanigans have just enough variety to stay interesting. Perhaps most importantly to me, its simply a bit odd a lot of the time. It feels off, like the makers were winging it, making stuff up on the fly and not bothering to fill in the gaps, something that I can appreciate as I happen to be a tremendous fan of cinematic strangeness. I wouldn't recommend this one to most, but for me it holds up pretty well and may be of interest to other curiosity seekers. 6/10.
Low budget but effective little movie concerning Satan's power over desperate people
unclehugo25 March 2008
Warning: Spoilers
Henry, the outcast, is constantly abused by his stepfather, an alcoholic, violent man, and humiliated by almost all people in his native town. One day Henry decides to take off and try his luck in the city, where he takes part in a robbery perpetrated by a group of petty criminals. He looses his cool during the operation, hits someone's head with a blunt object and gets arrested while the others manage to escape. Henry sinks to the absolute bottom and just when he decides to commit suicide by throwing himself under the wheels of a speeding car, a mysterious stranger with the appearance of a reverend turns up. He offers Henry the chance of his lifetime. With his help, Henry pulls himself together, does a lot of exercises, is fed and given new clothes and education... Of course, all that doesn't come for free. The mysterious stranger is Satan's servant, if not Lucifer himself. When Henry decides to accept a satanic symbol as a tattoo, he makes a pact with the devil and becomes the instrument of evil. Henry returns to his home town with a fancy car, fashionable clothes and altered personality. He takes revenge on his former tormentors, kills his stepfather and later wipes out the crooks who persuaded him to participate in the robbery. Henry also finds and impregnates a girl whose child is supposed to be sacrificed in honor of Satan... This neat little horror movie contains several bloody scenes, such as the death of Henry's abusive stepfather who meets a painful end while working with a chainsaw. One long and effective scene is set in a place resembling an empty garage where Henry must stay during his metamorphosis from a piece of trash to a self confident man. As a whole,Outcast is a satisfying horror movie that uses its low budget to make a good impression. I don't know any other films by Roman Buchok,but I found Outcast completely entertaining and professional. This movie was available on VHS in the Czech Republic in the 1990's but it would surely find its audience on DVD in the United States .
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