
That smell is less divinity and more inanity
dir: Eddie Alcazar
2023
Yeah…nah.
If this had come out 40 years ago, it might have become a cult classic. Since it came out last year, well, it’s just an odd, somewhat pointless pre-emptive artefact.
An old crazy scientist (Scott Bakula) talks about creating something that will give people immortality, if he can just crack it, crack something, some part of the equation.
That doesn’t work. But he has two sons, and one of them grows up to be Stephen Dorff. You remember, Hollywood megahunk Stephen Dorff? He played the villain in the original Blade movie? I’m sure he’s done something since then, though not sure what.
Anyway, he’s still around. He’s still relatively fit. Why shouldn’t he work?
He, too, is a scientist, but he’s advanced the ‘cure’ for aging beyond what his father achieved. It’s a product, called Divinity, and it’s sold in perfume-like bottles to the slavering masses.
It makes men gigantic and throbbing with muscles. It keeps women lithe and wrinkleless.
But either it’s making everyone sterile, or everyone is sterile anyway, because reasons.
Stephen Dorff’s character is called Jaxxon Pierce. When I was watching the flick, I just thought that they were saying “Jackson”, and it did not bother me. But when I looked it up, and saw the two Xs, my heart sank. Because that’s just terrible.
I think selling this Divinity crap has made him very wealthy. He has a massive kind of mansion somewhere in the mountains, or the desert, or the desert mountains, but the last time I saw something like that it was Jackie Treehorn’s massive mansion in The Big Lebowski.
Now, if you’re unlike me, you haven’t watched The Big Lebowski countless times, every time it popped up on cable, because you had better things to do with your life and your time.
I didn’t. So, yeah, to me it looks less like the lair of a mad scientist, and more the fuckpad of a very successful pornographer.
Speaking of which, the scientist just has this young demanding waif (Emily Willis) on staff who demands that he stops working and have sex with her.
Geez, don’t you just hate that? I mean, there you are trying to perfect the formula for immortality for the mind and body, and a hot young thing compels you to start pleasuring her?
Oh, the places they’ll go without travelling very far. I mean, how often do you get to watch a man (hopefully simulating) having sex with a woman thirty years his junior?
These sex scenes go on a fair while. They go on long enough and are enthusiastic enough that the scientist doesn’t notice that two, uh, guys? sneak into his mansion / compound.
They shoot him mid-coitus (which is the worst time and place to get shot) with some energy weapon, and then tie him to a chair. The woman runs screaming from the mansion, into the desert.
This may come as a surprise to you, but then this weird thing happens and these thin young women appear out of nowhere and bring the naked woman to some place where her fertility can be protected, and she can wear a sensible pony tail, and wear a non-revealing body suit, and stand there expressionless as some cult leader woman says stuff about saving the world.
The two guys who appeared (from the sky? from a spaceship? from another dimension? from the future? from the past?) act weird and do weird things, so our human ways are strange to them. They strap Jaxxon to a chair and then force feed Divinity into him intravenously, which he complains about. But they don’t stop, because Jaxxon is bad and they have to stop him, and stop the production of Divinity. Because it’s bad, don’t you know.
Somehow, Jaxxon anticipated what way the plot of the movie was going to go (even though it’s pretty obvious there was no script), and booked, I’m not making this up, a sex worker to arrive at his mansion, not knowing that he was going to be tied up and made to get high on his own supply. And she arrives thinking she was hired by the two kidnapper weirdos, and has sex with them, and they eat all this food prepared for some feast(?)
Because, um, it’s Jaxxon’s birthday?
I’m sorry, people, I don’t think the woman who turns up is an actor. Even with the IMDB listing, and other credits, I just don’t think it’s possible. I’m not even sure she knows it’s a movie being made around her. That doesn’t mean she reacts to everything that’s happening in believable or realistic ways, or like the cameras are hidden. Far from it. Perhaps I mean exactly the opposite. Okay, I do mean the exact opposite, but I don’t want to be mean.
Jaxxon has a brother. The brother is called Rip. Rip is played by an absolute man mountain, the kind of which wins the Mr Universe competition four times, and barely looks human, and definitely abuses steroids.
But…but he didn’t do ‘this’ for the film – he looks like that all the time. He wants to celebrate his brother’s birthday. So he turns up, and a bunch of other bodybuilders and slim young women turn up at Jaxxon’s compound.
To party.
Meanwhile, Jaxxon goes from looking like Stephen Dorff to looking like Stephen Dorff with a whole swole bunch of latex all over his body and head.
There’s a stop motion animated fight scene towards the end, where one of the alien bros fights the giant dick like creature that Stephen Dorff becomes.
Then some other shit happens, a woman who wasn’t pregnant gives birth to something that looks like a cross between a pot plant and something with hotdogs for tentacles.
And then it’s over. It’s all black and white, except for a few seconds at the end, and it looks like it cost about $200 to make, and that was probably from hiring a bus to bring in the body builders from Venice Beach to the mansion for a couple of hours.
The thing about outsider / experimental ‘art’ is that sometimes it’s ground breaking because it forces us to set aside the conventions and expectations we have in shocking or disarming ways. It takes talent. Skill. Vision. Something.
And then sometimes stuff is bonkers and shocking because people’s reach way, way exceeds their grasp. We can all aspire to greatness, and end up with something that stinks like the worst direct-to-video crap from the 80s.
I found none of this fun, intriguing, compelling or thoughtful in any way, and yet I still applaud the people involved for finding what they thought of as innovative solutions to budgetary constraints and creative shortfalls, and eventually finished this ‘product’ for our appreciation. I mean, I didn’t like it in any way, but well done getting it done, probably during the Covid era, probably with less money than what’s spent on the average bodybuilder's course of steroids for a bulking and cutting cycle.
It’s good that things like this are made, even if they make no sense because they’re nonsense, and even when they only go for around 80 something minutes (yet somehow feel 4 hours long).
The profound allegorical point the flick thinks it’s making is that Hollywood people sacrifice their souls and children in order to look beautiful and muscly, in a flick that uses scantily clad young women and man monsters employed specifically for how they look in order to deliver a story that decries people wanting to look the way they look that got them the job...
I just… I can’t even, as the young folks say.
Ugh, just no.
4 times Divinity was a dull experience out of 10
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“You will never age physically again. Your search for salvation is over.” – please keep looking, there’s nothing for you here - Divinity
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