‘The First Power’ (1990) - Robert Resnikoff.

The 90s proved to be anything but a choice year for the once ubiquitous TA-strewn slasher flick, now already being regarded as an anachronism overripe for parody. The once popular, rabidly ‘top-popping’, plasma-slopping genre had to evolve or die like so many hard bodied, bikini-clad scream-dreamers before it! Writer/director, Robert Resnikoff proved himself a post-modernist horror alchemist by dynamically rebirthing retrograde maverick cop/serial killer slashing mayhem in his bravura attempt to revivify mainstream horror's conspicuous decline. To his credit, Resnikoff's compelling satanic slasher ‘The First Power’ is both gruesome grindhouse throwback and a grisly glimmer of horror’s grave new dawn!

A swathe of savage occult slayings stir up the murder-hungry media into a morbid feeding frenzy. Hot-blooded, heroically handsome detective Logan (Lou Diamond Phillips) and feisty, red-headed, psychic sidekick, Tess (Tracy Griffith) are drawn dangerously deep into this demonic sadist's lurid labyrinth of infernally conceived metaphysical madness! ‘The Pentagram Killer’ (Jeff Kober) remains a memorably quipping, Aerosmith-looking, flesh flaying, body-hopping, blithely blasphemous bugaboo, hell-bent on quite literally raising some immortally strange hell in the city of angels!

‘The First Power’ looks and sounds terrific, Stuart Copeland's propulsive score turbocharges the vertigo-inducing stunts, kinetic vehicular carnage, and righteously splashy SPFX by maestro, Ed (Blood Rage)French. This wild admixture of B-horror miscellany coalesces into something greater than the sum of its bloodily stitched together parts! The prime power behind this 90s satanic shocker's brimstone blackened throne is, Jeff Kober’s wantonly skin ripping, sinisterly Soul-stripping, cop-bating serial killer. Kober's malefic ‘Pentagram Killer’ is a far more colourful corpse-maker than lumberingly monotonous franchise fairies like vapid, Voorhees or that mumblecore misanthrope, Myers!