If you’ve spent any time rummaging through the more questionable end of horror, you’ll know the name Full Moon. Founded by Charles Band, Full Moon specialised in direct-to-video genre films that were cheap, fast, and designed to stand out on a video store shelf. Usually that meant a weird central gimmick, some decent practical effects, and just enough sleaze to keep things moving. Netherworld fits that mould perfectly.
Netherworld is one of those films where you spend most of the runtime trying to figure out what it’s doing… and the rest wondering if it knows either. Directed by David Schmoeller – best known for Puppet Master – this is a low-budget Southern Gothic horror that throws voodoo, resurrection, brothels, birds, and a flying murder-hand into the same pot and just hopes it comes out tasting like something coherent.
It doesn’t exactly, but it is an interesting film. The setup is actually fairly straightforward. Corey Thornton (Michael Bendetti) inherits his estranged father’s Louisiana estate, only to find out his old man was deeply involved in voodoo rituals and had apparently been working on a way to cheat death. Instead of immediately getting back on the first bus out of there, Corey decides to stick around and see how this all plays out.
From there, the film drifts into a swampy mix of cult activity, strange locals, and a brothel which is home to the mysterious Dolores (Denise Gentile), who seems to be at the centre of whatever’s going on. And look, Denise Gentile was fine as hell in this film so that’s no bad thing.
We also have Dianna Palmer (Holly Floria), the housekeeper’s daughter, who has this full-on Southern “Dixie” vibe going on and ends up positioned as an alternative love interest for Corey, despite the film literally introducing her as “jailbait,” which is a choice. But watch the scene where she and Corey have their first conversation, and she’s in her full horse riding outfit and calling him “young Corey Thornton” in that Southern drawl, and you’ll get it.
What follows is a Southern Gothic mystery with light elements of neo-noir. Michael Bendetti as Corey makes for a decent lead. He’s got this slightly brooding, detached quality that makes him feel like a young Johnny Depp who accidentally wandered into a Full Moon production. It’s honestly a shame he didn’t do more films, because there’s definitely some charisma there.
Atmosphere-wise, this thing really does have something. There’s this strange, hazy, dreamlike quality hanging over the whole film. The Louisiana bayou setting, the brothel full of oddballs, the constant feeling that nobody is telling Corey the full truth, it all gives Netherworld a unique identity even when the story itself starts wandering in circles.
The film is packed with strange, memorable moments. For one, there’s the flying zombie hand thing – basically a possessed hand with snake-head fingers – which shows up on occasion and absolutely wrecks people. In one particularly nasty scene, it pulverises some poor bastard’s face and pops his eye out like it’s trying to win a prize at a carnival game. It’s properly grimy early-90s gore, and honestly one of the film’s highlights.
Then there’s the film’s supporting cast of swamp weirdos and human red flags. You’ve got the Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Holly Butler) drifting around the brothel like she took a wrong turn out of a David Lynch film. There’s Beauregard Yates (Robert Burr), the estate executor and proud owner of the most revolting fingernails ever committed to film. And, perhaps most memorably, there’s crazy old Barbusoir (Mark Kemble), Corey’s father’s handyman and general swamp goblin, who keeps insisting on drunkenly dancing with Corey in a way that feels less “friendly local” and more “uncle nobody leaves alone with the younger relatives at Christmas.”
The flavour and world building in the story helps make the whole thing feel like a lost Clive Barker Books of Blood stort. In fact, that’s probably the best description for the film as a whole – it’s basically a bargain-bin Barker story. Not quite Hellraiser, not quite Nightbreed, but circling those same ideas of desire, corruption, and the supernatural bleeding into everyday life.
Unfortunately, if we’re comparing this film to Clive Barker’s work, then it’s inevitably going to come up short. Netherworld never quite has the confidence or coherence to fully pull its Barker-esque ideas together. Because for something that leans so heavily into mythology and symbolism, it doesn’t really make much sense when you stop and think about it.
There’s this whole recurring bird motif – souls trapped in birds, feathers everywhere, bird hearts used in sacrificial rites, bird imagery tied to the afterlife – which does feel quite fitting for a horror film that makes heavy use of Voodoo (from the perspective of my pasty white ass). But then the main supernatural threat is this flying snake-hand monster that sounds like an eagle every time it attacks someone. What’s that about?
This isn’t even mentioning all the freaks and monstrosities that hang out in the basement of the brothel. I don’t really get how deformed midgets, old crones, and general oddball monster-looking folks really fit into the bigger picture. I get that they’re trying to paint this bigger picture of a world where magic and the mundane exist side by side, but it really just feels like a bunch of supernatural elements thrown together at times.
For large chunks of the runtime, the film just sort of drifts from one strange encounter to another. Corey investigates his father’s past at the pace of a man trying not to miss lunch, characters appear and disappear seemingly at random, and subplots never really build toward much. Then the ending suddenly arrives in a rush, as if the production realised they only had ten minutes left to explain everything.
Still, as messy and tonally inconsistent as it is, I did enjoy Netherworld. Half the time it feels like it’s making things up as it goes along. But there’s also something oddly hypnotic about it. The sort of film you sink into rather than properly follow. Best just to strap in and see where the experience takes you, like dancing with Barbusoir.
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