Dark Angel: The Ascent (1994)

Veronica (Angela Featherstone), a young demon, is more than just somewhat unhappy with her life in hell. Hell, it turns out, is pretty boring for a young woman not satisfied with her place in the underworld. Her father Hellikin (Nicholas Worth) is sweaty and abusive, treating here dream visions of ascending to the overworld with his fists and a lot of shouting.

Eventually, Veronica, accompanied by her “beast” (or as we call them around here, German Shepard Dog) Hellraiser (Heros), flees to the overworld. Once there she falls in with and for a young physician (Daniel Markel), and spends her nights smiting evil-doers, for in this interpretation of demons and hell, Veronica’s kind is definitely doing the dirty work for heaven. She will need some time – and some heavenly “encouragement” – to learn about concepts like punishments being meant to be appropriate to the heaviness of the crime. Before that, she’s all about ripping muggers’ and would be rapists’ spines out and feeding their flesh to her dog as well as to her unwitting new boyfriend. Veronica’s not only going after the small fry, though. Having early on identified the city’s right-wing mayor as “evil incarnate”, she is planning to do something about him.

I have no idea where Linda Hassani’s (whose magnum opus this is) Dark Angel: The Ascent has hidden from me all of my life, but I’m certainly very happy that we have finally found each other. This was made in the early Romanian phase of Charles Band’s Full Moon, at a point in time when the budgets were still workable, and Band and company still seem to have been interested in making proper low budget movies instead of mostly focussing on very slow moving in-jokes about puppets and dolls.

Hassani makes a lot out of what Band gives her, turning the Romanian sets as lively as possible through the powers of inventive lighting and genuinely great camerawork by veteran Romanian DP Vivi Dragan Vasile. The film starts with a really cleverly realized low budget hell, containing the proper titbits of the more violent versions of Christianity and quite a few good jokes and continues in that mode when Veronica arrives in New York, Hassani selling fake America with the best of them.

Tonally, the film is a curious mixture of actually pretty coherent (if not exactly real-world canonical) theology, straight-faced jokes, some well done violence, quite the dollop of goofiness, and just as much seriousness. The script by Matthew Bright (who wrote quite a bit of interesting stuff like this and Freeway) clearly has a lot of fun with the sillier elements of the plot, but the filmmakers do present jokes and silliness with as straight a face as possible, as do the actors, who avoid all winking into the camera even in moments when most anyone would have been tempted to do some of it. Of course, the film’s jokes are all the funnier because they are presented with that straight a face and never get in the way of the film’s serious side of right wing bashing, light feminism, romance and fun violence. There’s a lot of actual intelligence in the writing and the staging of the film, Hassani and Bright clearly understanding that having fun and being silly does not mean you can’t also take your film seriously at the same time.

In its own wonderfully eccentric way, Dark Angel does fit snugly in between other 90s (mostly low budget) attempts at making dark superhero/urban vigilante movies, mostly getting around the problem a lot of these films had with understanding the differences between the superhero and urban vigilante genres thanks to its violent religious angle. Grimdark superheroes and visitors from hell do ponder comparable moral conundrums, it turns out, just in rather a different language. The film’s really interesting when it comes to its portrayal of Veronica’s little bits of slaughter, too, or rather, it repeatedly portrays the people she rescues as being genuinely afraid of her and disturbed by her methods, going very much against the grain of typical vigilante movies who’d never dare suggest a victim of a crime might react with anything else but a high five to being rescued in the most violent way possible. It’s interesting, and really important to the very specific kind of redemption tale the film is telling.

But before I leave anyone with the impression that this is a totally serious movie for totally serious people, let me quote my favourite scene to you. Veronica has just disrupted two police officers beating up a gentleman for the crime of walking through the streets at night while being black (and yes, the lack of improvement between then and now in this regard is pretty damn depressing). Non-plussed by a slight young woman with very big feet (that’s a plot point) talking grim-faced biblical vengeance at them (Featherstone’s pretty great at that particular note in most of her scenes), one of the cops says “How would you like to spend the night in jail – on a prostitution charge?”. To which our heroine replies “How would you like to die in a state of mortal sin?” before dispatching the cops rather easily. Which may very well be the best line a movie vigilante has ever said to someone.

The hopeful viewer can also look forward to a first date at a porn cinema (Taxi Driver was certainly not lost on the filmmakers), a floating angel lady right out of a Christian kitsch postcard, and various comments on the mores of Hell and Earth.

I honestly have no idea what more anyone could ask of any movie.