The Yellow Sign: Hellblazer

What does it mean to be a fan? Nowadays, it seems that fans, fan fic, and remix culture has grown in direct proportion to larger scale popular culture franchises. People become fans of an idea so much so that if a movie doesn’t fully realize their private expectations before entering the theater, they just might take the movie into their own hands and transform it, cut out elements, rearrange it, add in scenes from entirely different films altogether. I ran across the online community for this practice, fanedit.org, when I saw there was a torrent out there for a movie called Hellblazer.

I’ve always loved this comic. I first encountered John Constantine in Swamp Thing, a best friend collected comics and he’d forced them under my nose. “This one’s awesome, it’s got vampires that live in this town that’d been flooded,” he said, which was enough to hold my interest for that first toke. From then on, I burned my way through his Swamp Thing collection, and dug into the Hellblazers he’d started collecting, before realizing that I’d been hooked.

Since then, I’ve always been observant of the path blazed by Alan Moore, Jamie Delano, Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis, Neil Gaiman, and Mike Carey through the DC Universe with Constantine. He’s shown up in Sandman, Swamp Thing, The Books of Magic and as the main character in his own ongoing comic book Hellblazer he’s been fully fleshed out into a hard-edged anti-hero who’s sloppy approach to magick always appealed to my sensibilities. I am a sporadic, yet avid collector for years now, and to be completely honest I have a stack right now of Denise Mina’s run I’ve been meaning to read for a week.

When the movie ‘Constantine” hit the theaters, I went expecting to be disappointed. Sadly, I was. An otherwise dull and plodding supernatural detective story (a film genre that for me begins and ends with Angelheart) with the lead Keanu Reeves a shabby mirror-world interpretation of the cocky magician from Britain through an Americanized extension. Knowing the film was coming out frustrated me, as there were enough elements in and of themselves which were rewarding in their own right.

Where the film erred was by reducing the film to a morality play in which John Constantine’s character is but a caricature of his presence in the graphic novels. The writers erred in Frank William Chandler (aka Chas) being transformed into a young punk kid. The depth and complexity of the spiritual world into which John Constantine can interact being reduced to a psychic kid who’d killed himself is farcical and overlooks the established origins, all of which are much more compelling.

I’d felt they’d done little more than help set the stage whereby an intrigued viewer might stumble down to a comic shop and actually do some deeper reading. That’s certainly how a franchise works: the film has become little more than a long advertisement for the graphic novels/video games/soundtrack (and the music was stellar, don’t get me wrong) all tied in to the parent corporation. But sometimes, in this sceme, the parent corporation makes some fucked up production decisions.

Hiring Keneau Reeves to play a blond British magician who is 40 going on ancient was the first, but certainly not the worst of the producer’s decisions. Cutting Michelle Monaghan’s character Ellie entirely from the film after the sequences had been shot ranks higher than even the annoyingly pedantic anti-smoking gum advertisement that underscored the entire film. Relegating angels and demons to some half-breed status to fulfill the screenwriter decisions to replace Garth Ennis’ perfectly good twist in Dangerous Habits is also unforgivable, and sadly not as fixable as the reinstatement of Ellie into John Constantine’s filmic existence. I half-suspect the entire Hellblazer franchise was endangered by the mess the producers made of this movie.

Enter FanEdit.Org in general and Jorge in particular. Jorge took a good deal of the deleted scene footage available on the DVD release of Constantine and remixed the closest approximation of what a Hellblazer film could have been, simply with the materials at hand. The new scenes, a new title sequence, and a closing graphic help establish this as a film called ‘Hellblazer” rather than “Constantine” and there’s a torrent here for not simply an AVI but an entire file structure for a DVD.

I’d considered myself manipulating this movie in particular into a more desirable configuration. To actually run across this on the torrents felt somewhat surreal to me, and, while I can’t say that all of the above elements do still piss me off, I think that Reeves did do a very good job pulling what essence of Constantine was alloted to him by the plot and the quips forced upon him.

And, quite frankly, Lucifer kicked much ass. The inspiringly creepy performance from Peter Stormare commanded a presence on screen in the rewatching that is as rewarding as the first time I saw it. Gavin Rossdale and Tilda Swinton both were compelling, but that fucking ‘half-breed’ concept seriously annoyed me, as did the way JC refers to what he does as ‘deportation,’ none of which Jorge could have remixed out.

Still, seeing what Jorge did to the film, I must say he improved it immensely. I’ve noticed he has remixed a few other films, and on the strength of this one I certainly intend to view more of his work. And it’s a pleasure to see something done to salvage the filmic carcass of one of my favorite comic book narratives, and I heartily applaud the effort.

Hellblazer (Jorge’s fanedit of the film Constantine)

Straight to Hell: A Hellblazer Site

Hellblazer 1-216 in CBR format