By: Pamela DiFrancesco

A long-dead occultist. A science lab that looks like a recording studio from the 1970s. A terrible purple suit.

These are the lingering images from the film Crowley (UK name Chemical Wedding ), a quasi-horror script written by Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson and starring a phenomenal Simon Callow, who, with the help of a virtual reality machine, goes from a stuttering, mild-mannered professor to the embodiment of “The Beast,” Aleister Crowley.

Crowley is back from the dead and he is here to sex up the present. His first acts are to shave his head and urinate on a lecture of his host body’s former students. While his ultimate goal is to recreate a black magic ritual called the Chemical Wedding and legitimately birth himself into the present, his time in the “here and now” is mostly spent hypnotizing and banging all the women who cross his path, and stealing suits from pimps.

The film carries several sub-plots, like the romance between a driven college journalist and a scientist working on the virtual reality machine, the true nature of the scientist (he’s a Moonchild — but if you don’t understand that, don’t worry — the film never really explains it), and the struggle of a man who watched the real Crowley die, but they all take a backseat to the stellar performance of Simon Callow. He brings life, fear and creepy sex appeal to Crowley. He’s the main thing to watch in this otherwise so-so feature.

Despite several grisly deaths, there’s no real horror to be found in Crowley. The only wincers are a hypodermic needle to an eye and the same to a heart. The visuals, like the virtual reality suit, complete with a “grey alien”-like head and a bluish force field that ripples and undulates the screen cheesily, are often more laughter-inducing than fearsome. From its first scene to its penultimate, hazy realization of alternate universes in which Crowley may be alive, this one’s not exactly a horror aficionado’s dream. But, in the wake of crappy remakes of classics and Japanese films, at least it’s original.