I remember a moment, staring at "The Temptation of Saint Anthony" by Dali, with its spindly-legged elephants, when I thought to myself just how many subtle details of real elephants Dali had managed to incorporate into the painting, and how those subtle details really helped sell the more outre elements of the image. I was a very young fellow, on the verge of becoming an adult, and those realistic details set off a little epiphany in my mind -- it's the realistic details, grounding the fantasy, that let a viewer accept flights of fantasy. Every great fantasy has some echo of something in the real world to make it great.

I say this because I didn't believe Demon Hunter for a second. It's opening scene raised questions that kept nagging me for the rest of the movie, and kept me from really getting into it. Which is a shame, because the movie is actually pretty well made, and its star (Sean Patrick Flannery, of The Boondock Saints) has some terrific screen presence, but I just kept asking myself -- well, I suppose I need to back up a bit and describe the opening scene for you.

The film begins with an exorcism, a setting all of us horrorphiles are familiar with, with a priest trying to drive a demonic presence out of a young girl. Unfortunately, however, this particulat priest isn't really up to the challenge, and the posessed young girl ends up biting part of his face off and killing him. This is when Jake Greyman, the titular demon hunter comes in. He's been waiting downstairs, whittling a point into the end of a wooden cross (I couldn't help thinking of Jason Robard's line from Once Upon A Time In The West as this was happening -- "He's whittling on a piece of wood. When he stops whittling, something's going to happen.")

What happens is that Jake comes in, beats the posessed young lass to a pulp and then stabs her in the heart with the pointy end he whittled into the wooden cross. And then he walks out, leaving the young girl's mother cursing at him in Spanish.

Jake, you see, is someone the Catholic church sends in when exorcisms fail -- a cleaner for exorcists. While the idea of a character like this is certainly a compelling one, all I could think of is why this story doesn't end up as front page news the next morning. In an age when it seems that every week some new story of a pedophile priest seems to make the lead on the ten o'clock news (I live in the midwest and that's when the nightly news comes on here), I would think that a priest and a young girl dying during an exorcism would be all over CNN like flies on a dog turd.

I guess there is a movie about that already (The Exorcism of Emily Rose), and this is meant to be a different kind of story, but that question just kept nagging me all through the movie. As a result, the suspension of my disbelief never really happened at any point duing the movie.

As I said, earlier, the movie itself is, in terms of craft, very well made (which is probably how it managed to snag Anchor Bay as its distributor) with some good action sequences and good work by both its lead and by Billy Drago, playing Asmodeus, the demon of lest (and thirteenth level D&D monster). Drago has done really good work in pretty bad movies for years (with The Untouchables being his big shining moment) and I wish someone would give him a balls-out villain role in a great movie, because the guy is one scary looking muthafuckah.

But the movie is also very typical in a lot of ways. Jake, you see, is a half-human/half-demon that is constantly in danger of letting his bad self take control of things (and just how many movies have had a character like this at their core), and of course, he's the only one that can stop the apocalypse from happening (again, a long list of other movies comes to mind).

In this case, our apocalypse is coming about courtesy of Asmodeus slipping his seed into a human female so she can give birth to -- drum roll please -- the antichrist! He's not having too easy a time finding a woman who can fit the bill (how far back the cause of demonic husbandry has slipped -- thirty-five years ago all the devil had to do was find a vain actor willing to pimp out his wife for stardom). He's stuck looking for love among the crack whores of Los Angeles, which is just kind of pathetic in a way.

He soon finds willing host in Nancy Yoon, playing a Korean prostitute turned billionaire widow, and he manages to diddle her in a mausoleum to set the end of the world in motion.

Imagine checking out a blues band, and they play a variation on the riff of Muddy Waters' Mannish Boy as they kick into their first song. You think to yourself, "eh, pretty typical". Well, that's Demon Hunter in a nutshell.

Anchor Bay offers up a decent 1.77:1 anamorphic transfer, a making of doc that shows how much effort went into the physical side of the movie (the writer, Mitch Gould. also served as stunt coordinator and the fight scenes are well handled for a low budget movie), and you learn that apparently Sean Patrick Flannery is a nice guy, but it's nothing really earth-shattering. If you like the movie more than I did you may find it interesting.

The commentary track by Gould and actress Nancy Yoon is a total snooze fest. Gould seems like he doesn't really want to be there, and while Ms. Yoon is a little more enthusiastic, she can't really tip the scales of excitement over. You do pick up a few tidbits, such as the fact that the draft of the script that was sold and was produced was the rough draft (the author's preferred draft took place in New Orleans amid the occult culture there), which may explain Gould's lack of enthusiasm for the film. I understand just how he feels.