Julian Sands, despite his roles in The Killing Fields and Room With A View, has appeared in more than his share of clinkers of late. Gothicfor one, in which he impersonated Percy Bysshe Shelley and was required to utter the astounding line “Laudanum - I can handle it”.
It was a shrewd soul who cast the dashing young thespian as Warlock’s eponymous evil doer. According to arch-enemy and one-man witch-buster Giles RedFerne (Withnail and I's Richard E. Grant). “he’s the rudest Warlock that ever travelled daylight,” which understates the case somewhat.
The movie gets into gear when the warlock, with Redferne in hot pursuit, crash lands into the pad of Kooky Kalifornian waitress Kassandra. In an effort to beat the warlock, Redferne forms an unlikely alliance with Kassandra, who’s a little time-warped herself having aged 20 years overnight thanks to a beastly warlockian spell.
The couple take to the highway in Kassandra’s clapped out wreck and follow the flying warlock first to the farm of some superstitious Amish folk (“A horse that sweats in the morning, milk that sours overnight - these are the signs”) and back to Massachusetts for an exhausting climax.