Sometimes I just find weird stuff and decide to check it out. That’s basically what happened with The Spine of Night. I was flipping through my streaming services for something to watch when I tried Shudder and one of their live channels was showing some sort of odd-looking animated movie. A quick look told me it was a “Shudder exclusive” or some such, a rotoscoped animated movie like the kind Ralph Bakshi used to make. OK, I was now officially intrigued enough to check it out.
And, well, it sure was different and weird.
The movie opens with Tzod, a nearly naked “swamp witch” voiced by Lucy Lawless trudging through snow and ice to see the more or less immortal Guardian (Richard E Grant). The Guardian protects a magical flower, the last of its kind, that grants anyone who ingests it with vast magical powers. Tzod is there to tell the Guardian a long series of stories. Centuries earlier, she was involved in some kind of ceremony with her tribe when the local warlord’s son (Patton Oswalt) dispatched a mercenary named Mongrel (Joe Manganiello) to retrieve the witch and slaughter the rest of her small tribe. Captured, she’s taken back to Lord Pyrantin’s compound where she is tossed into a cell with visiting scholar Ghar-Sur (Jordan Douglas Smith). Tzod has a large collection of the bloom’s leaves around her neck, and while she does use them to eventually escape, Ghar-Sur steals the plant, stabs her, and runs off to eventually become an all-powerful warlord, conquering everything in his path with a growing army of followers.
It’s a bit hard to say what exactly happens as the plot is more like a series of vignettes as Tzod describes different points in Ghar-Sur’s rise to power. Suffice to say this is a very violent movie. Characters are beheaded, disemboweled, and one man gets hit by an arrow, only to take it out and stab an attacker through the eye with it. As the time span for the movie is over centuries, plenty of characters appear in different stories, and many of them don’t last very long. Basically, don’t get too attached to anyone in this movie. There’s a good chance any character you see will die a violent death no matter what. Tzod and the Guardian are the closest the movie comes to main characters, and that’s mostly because Tzod narrates much of what happens aside from a section where the Guardian explains where the bloom came from.
Now, granted, it’s been a while since I saw any of Bakshi’s rotoscoped work, but I seem to recall it looking a bit better than The Spine of Night. There’s a lot of uncanny valley going on with this movie, and it doesn’t look all that good anyway. The backgrounds look more photo-realistic than the moving characters in the foreground, and while the movie has some crazy visuals to go with a setting like this, I can’t say I was all that impressed with the animation.
That goes double for the characters. Lawless and especially Grant give their characters a certain amount of gravitas just with their voices, but there really aren’t any particularly memorable characters in this, and since most of the characters don’t seem to last longer than twenty minutes, I can’t say there’s much to recommend here unless you’re really into animation. There’s some creativity here, but given the short run time of 93 minutes, the movie never does much more than skim the surface of what could have otherwise been an interesting world.
Grade: C
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