I’m a big fan of the band Iron Maiden. Well, I like the song Run To The Hills. That’s about the conflict between the Native Americans and the white settlers, told from Cree perspective. More importantly, there’s a great guitar solo and a lot of shouting. Well, Bruce Dickinson, frontman of Maiden and now a qualified pilot, has added another string to his bow by writing this new film.
Simon Callow – the illegitimate offspring of Brian Blessed and a Furby that’s been left out in the rain – plays a professor who ends up becoming posessed with the spirit of Aleister Crowley (a real-life funny old chap who claimed to be “the wickedest man alive”).
Good clean knockabout fun, this ia a B-movie – low budget, ridiculous script, over the top actiing – and it’s all the better for it. No need to Run To The Hills when this is on! (Sorry, pathetic.)

Script writer Bruce Dickinson wanted to call Chemical Wedding ‘The Number Of The Beast’, a much better title, but perhaps his director and co-writer Julian Doyle thought that might be stressing the Iron Maiden connection a little too much. It’s already got an aesthetic that could only come from somebody as immersed in metal culture as the singer. It begins with a hot red-head, Cambridge University student Lia (Lucy Cudden) looking for a scoop for her college newspater and attempting to interview hunky American scientist Joshua Mathers (Kal Webber) about his new virtual reality suit. Unfortunately, for somewhat complicated reasons, the suit has been implanted with the personality of notorious Victorian occultist Aleister Crowley. So, when shy professor Oliver Haddo (Simon Callow) gets in he is immediately posessed by the reincarnation of Aleister and before you can say run to the hills, he’s off trying to perform a little sex magick and looking for a “scarlet woman” to take part in a bloody ritual. It’s highly entertaining, schlocky stuff with the bits of pop science thrown in (“I feel like Schroedinger’s Cat” etc) giving it even more of a b-movie feel. It might not be quite enough to forgive Bruce for ‘Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter’ but it does make you wonder if there’s anything the singer, jet pilot and champion fencer can’t do.
– Trevor Baker, Rocksound.

Some movies manage to transcend a barking plot, a cast of talentless actors and dimwitted dialogue to achieve a bizarrely compelling alchemy. Chemical Wedding is such a half-baked achievement. It’s a harebrained marriage of bargain-basement sci-fi, occult tomfoolery and sexual absurdity. With Simon Callow in a velvet suit and matching titfer.

He plays Professor Haddo, a stammering Cambridge classics professor who appears to have escaped off the set of Little Britain. For some reason, a small group of spotty university scientists are experimenting with a virtual reality suit and the legendary Z93 supercomputer. However, one of the boffins – Dr Victor Neuman (Jud Charlton) – is a follower of Aleister Crowley – “the wickedest man in the world – and has loaded up the hard drive with back magic software.

Mild-mannered Haddo is coerced into the suit and – knock me down with a voodoo doll – emerges shorn, his stutter replaced with a steady stream of blasphemy. And a fancy for urinating on his students. He’s also got a taste for orgies above hippy trinket shops and ultimately fancies getting hitched to a redheaded “scarlet woman” in a notorious “chemical wedding”.

The script – penned by Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson – is so comically dire that he should be locked in one of the devices from which his band takes its name.
“Have we met?” some well-meaning don inquires of Haddo, only for the loquacious Callow to reply: “Only on the Astral Plane”.
It’s contrived New Age bunkum…but delivered with such jawdropping conviction that you find yourself entranced as if watching a train collide in slow motion. This is the sort of camply preposterous nonsense where semen can inexplicably be delivered by fax and a character with an electronic voice box gets the job of delivering the exposition. For ten minutes.

There’s no attempt to rein in Callow – a lumbering hybrid of George Melly and Buddha – and he boisterously runs riot in a performance which makes Rod Steiger look like a shrinking flower. Yet you will never be bored. So utterly doolally is this mincing extravaganza, that resistance is futile. Guilty pleasure of the year.

– Tim Evans – Sky Movies

Chemical Wedding hits UK cinemas on May 30th.