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Probably Wes Craven's best movie and, SURPRISE, he didn't even write it. Coincidence? I think not. The director asserts his own anima in the film with his customary epistemological mind games (even suggesting at one point that the second half of the film is a complete hallucination), but the film isn't as annoyingly reflexive as Craven's other work, much to the betterment of the film. The need to do justice to the source material seems to have kept this impulse in check.

The film itself is a hallucinatory plunge into Haiti to find the so-called zombie drug is based on fact. Bill Pullman plays Wade Davis, an anthropologist working for a pharmaceutical company in Haiti during the downfall of the Duvalier regime. In the course of events, he runs up against the ton ton macaout--Haiti's secret police--and gets himself buried alive (in a scene borrowed from Dreyer's Vampyr). The strength of this movie lies in the oppressive ambience of menace generated by its setting. Things here are in chaos--no need to tear away the curtain of reality, things are plainly out of hand. Pullman is good as a befuddled scientist out of his depth, as is Zakes Mokae as the head of the secret police. Things begin to go awry, however, when Craven asserts his own anima in the form of Nightmare on Elm St.-style reality games; none of these works or is nearly as scary as the torture sequence and its aftermath when Pullman admits that he knew they wouldn't kill him 'cause they only drove a nail through his scrotum. The imagery here is strong enough to sustain the movie even if the director doesn't know it. Craven's best movie and one of the few serious-minded horror movies of the eighties.