Rapturious

We're no strangers to horror. You know the rules and so do I. Kamal Ahmed (The Jerky Boys) takes the barren and unpopulated sub-genre of Urban horror and releases a film that most viewers will come to terms with. Rapturious is a flawed piece of cinema but one cannot help but enjoy what they are being served. Call it a guilty pleasure, if you will.

Slip into the Rabbit hole with Rapturious, an up and coming horrorcore rapper (Judging from his monotone and stale lyrics). He's the average honky sculpted in the Korn's Jonathan Davis ala father molesting scandal. His fragmented past and his famous future collide in an endless clash. He, just like many others, begins dabbling in Latino provided mind-altering drugs to boost creative juices and forget his trauma. After doing it all, he is given a new experimental drug called Afterlife which throttles him into nightmarish hallucinations or murder.

Like so many Urban horror films before it, Rapturious makes quick to exploit the "vices" of blacks, this being drugs, white women, money, and hip-hop. The dream is being lived till this is jeopardized by a fucked up whitey dropped on their studio's doorstep. Originally, Urban horror films like Tales from the Hood used polar opposite blacks to create a composite difference between the respectable Negro and the ignorant gang-bangers. Rapturious drops the race message and focuses on a film that is a Creepshow version of 8 Mile.


Filming horror in a gritty and dirty style, both psychological and manifestation scenes, is always a huge risk later when editing. Production value can be sacrificed as your film looks like utter garbage. Many precautions should be taken, lest you want your film to look like the filler scenes of Rapturious. While the presentation of the nightmare scenes, sex scenes, and hallucinations are stellar, I found the drama section of this film to be filmed by a director who doesn't bleed for his work.

To continue with the unpleasantness, the story was as shattered and hole-ridden as Rapturious' forced persona was. The duration of this film lays on thick a pretentious coating of a self-boasting mindfuck surprise ending, when in reality the ending was guessed 20 minutes into the film. The ending doesn't have closure and you're left with a period piece side story of Native Americans, the west frontier, and a Tim Curry devil wannabe.

For a rap horror film, the "freestyles" were laughably bad. Not as much as, lets say...Ragdoll. Even though Rapturious ain't much of a rapper, he is an interesting character and as well as a hell of a good actor. I couldn't help but enjoy Rapturious for being an Urban horror film with flair and conflict. God knows we need another Killjoy (sarcasm alert). It's nowhere near as perfect as Ragdoll is, and it isn't racy and sublime like Tales from the Hood, but Rapturious came a long way with its white rapper so I'll let it be. Rapturious is nearly as sharp as its Devil's claw.

-mAQ