There are any number of movies out there, and you find some that have evaded much comment by checking out the freebies on Amazon Prime. That’s how I found Netherworld. It’s not a great movie. In fact, it’s about the opposite, but it is more southern gothic and since I’ve been watching Louisiana horror, well, why not? It was free. The story doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, which is a pity because the ideas seem to have some potential. So, Cory Thornton has inherited his father’s Louisiana estate. He didn’t know his father and the estate is run by an improbable staff of one. (One suspects a low budget had something to do with that. For the film, not diegetically.) The estate abuts a brothel where one of the employees turns evildoers into birds with the help of magic.
Meanwhile, the young master finds hints how to raise his estranged father from the dead, which, for some reason, he decides to do. There are dream sequences and perhaps shades of Papageno. Lots of birds in this film. Cory—not very bright—only discovers late in the movie that his father was evil. Hm, no hints of that in his admitted sexual dalliances and his desire to be resurrected. No siree, none at all. By the end I wasn’t surprised to learn that it was released directly to video. But I was led down the rabbit hole by David Schmoeller, the director. Schmoeller has received notice of such people as Stephen King, and has given the world some notable cult movies. It’s fair to say he never made it big in Hollywood, but he worked on some films of repute, even drawing in Klaus Kinski at one point.
There are several tiers to the creative life. There are those who attain fame, and layered down from them, those who produce movies, songs, novels—any kind of creative output—to those most of us have never heard of. I find this profoundly hopeful. Nobody is known to every single person on this planet. Even the famous aren’t known by everyone. I like to think I’m reasonably informed, but I keep on hearing about celebrities in art forms I don’t follow and have no idea who they are. So before watching Netherworld I never paid attention to David Schmoeller, but then I learned he’d nevertheless made a career out of doing what he enjoyed, without becoming a famous director along the way. There are some practical obstacles, of course. Getting that first book published, or first movie distributed, but if you can get over that wall there may be a possibility of doing what you like. It may not make you rich, but you’ll have accomplished something important.