If you have a fetishistic love of gore or weird sexuality, then Faust: Love of the Damned is the movie for you. If, however, you appreciate coherent plotting, passable acting and some semblance of purpose other than to showcase gore and weird sexuality, then Faust: Love of the Damned may not be your cup of tea. I find I generally fall in the latter camp, as Faust: Love of the Damned proved a rather wearisome viewing experience for me.
I could explain the plot for Faust: Love of the Damned, but that would require the film to have much of a plot and for me to understand it, and, frankly, Faust comes up short on both fronts. Theoretically, Faust is the story of John Jaspers (Mark Frost), a painter who watches his girlfriend savagely murdered by some local toughs she owes money too, who is so consumed with revenge that he makes a deal with M (Andrew Divoff) for the power to exact his revenge in return for John's eternal soul. As far as the film shows us, though, he made a rather lousy deal, because M just puts some fancy razors on John's arms, and then he proceeds to slice up the responsible parties with them, failing to realize that, well, he didn't really need M's deal to do that. No matter, there wouldn't be a film without said deal, and in addition to signing over his soul, M uses John as his tool to lay waste to a Chinese consulate because, well, the film isn't very clear on that. After the scene at the consulate, John is sentenced to a mental ward, where the fetching Jade de Camp (Isabel Brook) tries to get through to him with her "music therapy". Meanwhile, police Lieutenant Margolies (Jeffery Combs) thinks something is fishy with the whole consulate killings, and begins an investigation.
After the above, Faust devolves into a meandering mess that is one part horror film, one part offbeat comedy and one part superhero film. However, nothing in the film really makes sense. M is trapped in a human body he wants to escape from, and is trying to resurrect Hommunculus, an ancient demon, for which a ritual is fast approaching. Who is M, really, you ask? The devil? Maybe, maybe Hommunculus is, I'm not sure. What did signing over John's soul and giving him powers do? I'm also not sure, but it turns out to be a bad move, because John manages to start using his new powers to attempt to thwart M by transforming into a creature that looks like a demon, but with a webby membrane of wings that looks suspiciously like a cape. Meanwhile, one of M's henchmen, Claire (Monica Van Campen) seduces John and most every other character she comes in contact with and engages in rough sex with them, often culminating in some bloody display of murder or torture after that. And Margolies is searching for some information about what is going on, but I'm not entirely sure what that information is, or what he plans to do with it.
Basically, Faust is a mess, scenes punctuated by vicious bloodletting or kinky sex, including one rather amusing, and head scratching, scene in which M tortures Claire for plotting against him by making her breasts and buttocks expand exponentially until she basically is a blob of over-sized flesh on the floor. The moments when John transforms into his demon/superhero alter-ego are rather ridiculous, thanks in part to the silly make-up effects for the demon, complete with the aforementioned cape that just flops around when it looks like it should be taut wings. It also doesn't help that most of those scenes are scored by an annoying heavy metal soundtrack that robs the film of any creepy atmosphere. The acting ranges from acceptable, in the form of Combs and Divoff, to astonishingly bad with Frost. Most of the scenes where is supposed to be displaying rage are just him pursing his lips and pouting at camera. Isabel Brook is somewhere in the middle, and Van Campen is just over the top silliness all the time. Most of the actors are probably doing the best they can considering they are delivering inane dialogue to support a nonsensical plot.
Faust is directed by Brian Yuzna, a longtime producer/director of low- budget horror films that started off with him producing some of the seminal mid-80s movies of Stuart Gordon, including Re-Animator and From Beyond. Those films, along with the productions Yuzna would later start directing himself, were often weird affairs, displaying a mix of humor, horror and sexuality, so Faust isn't really that far off from Yuzna's typical material, but many of those earlier films had some degree of story and purpose, and also contained some good humor or scares. Faust does have the sex and the blood, but it lacks almost anything else you would expect from a good film, even a low-budget genre piece such as this. Faust is just out and out bad, occasionally amusing or titillating, yes, but nothing more than that.
I could explain the plot for Faust: Love of the Damned, but that would require the film to have much of a plot and for me to understand it, and, frankly, Faust comes up short on both fronts. Theoretically, Faust is the story of John Jaspers (Mark Frost), a painter who watches his girlfriend savagely murdered by some local toughs she owes money too, who is so consumed with revenge that he makes a deal with M (Andrew Divoff) for the power to exact his revenge in return for John's eternal soul. As far as the film shows us, though, he made a rather lousy deal, because M just puts some fancy razors on John's arms, and then he proceeds to slice up the responsible parties with them, failing to realize that, well, he didn't really need M's deal to do that. No matter, there wouldn't be a film without said deal, and in addition to signing over his soul, M uses John as his tool to lay waste to a Chinese consulate because, well, the film isn't very clear on that. After the scene at the consulate, John is sentenced to a mental ward, where the fetching Jade de Camp (Isabel Brook) tries to get through to him with her "music therapy". Meanwhile, police Lieutenant Margolies (Jeffery Combs) thinks something is fishy with the whole consulate killings, and begins an investigation.
After the above, Faust devolves into a meandering mess that is one part horror film, one part offbeat comedy and one part superhero film. However, nothing in the film really makes sense. M is trapped in a human body he wants to escape from, and is trying to resurrect Hommunculus, an ancient demon, for which a ritual is fast approaching. Who is M, really, you ask? The devil? Maybe, maybe Hommunculus is, I'm not sure. What did signing over John's soul and giving him powers do? I'm also not sure, but it turns out to be a bad move, because John manages to start using his new powers to attempt to thwart M by transforming into a creature that looks like a demon, but with a webby membrane of wings that looks suspiciously like a cape. Meanwhile, one of M's henchmen, Claire (Monica Van Campen) seduces John and most every other character she comes in contact with and engages in rough sex with them, often culminating in some bloody display of murder or torture after that. And Margolies is searching for some information about what is going on, but I'm not entirely sure what that information is, or what he plans to do with it.
Basically, Faust is a mess, scenes punctuated by vicious bloodletting or kinky sex, including one rather amusing, and head scratching, scene in which M tortures Claire for plotting against him by making her breasts and buttocks expand exponentially until she basically is a blob of over-sized flesh on the floor. The moments when John transforms into his demon/superhero alter-ego are rather ridiculous, thanks in part to the silly make-up effects for the demon, complete with the aforementioned cape that just flops around when it looks like it should be taut wings. It also doesn't help that most of those scenes are scored by an annoying heavy metal soundtrack that robs the film of any creepy atmosphere. The acting ranges from acceptable, in the form of Combs and Divoff, to astonishingly bad with Frost. Most of the scenes where is supposed to be displaying rage are just him pursing his lips and pouting at camera. Isabel Brook is somewhere in the middle, and Van Campen is just over the top silliness all the time. Most of the actors are probably doing the best they can considering they are delivering inane dialogue to support a nonsensical plot.
Faust is directed by Brian Yuzna, a longtime producer/director of low- budget horror films that started off with him producing some of the seminal mid-80s movies of Stuart Gordon, including Re-Animator and From Beyond. Those films, along with the productions Yuzna would later start directing himself, were often weird affairs, displaying a mix of humor, horror and sexuality, so Faust isn't really that far off from Yuzna's typical material, but many of those earlier films had some degree of story and purpose, and also contained some good humor or scares. Faust does have the sex and the blood, but it lacks almost anything else you would expect from a good film, even a low-budget genre piece such as this. Faust is just out and out bad, occasionally amusing or titillating, yes, but nothing more than that.