Not, as the title may have led you to suppose, an ingenious blend of two novels by D.H. Lawrence. Rather, the "rainbow" and "serpent" turn out to be Haitian for "good" and "evil," and there are other such ethnological nuggets buried here, too. (The movie is based -- like that voodoo benchmark, I Walked with a Zombie -- on a work of nonfiction.) With the added historical-political dimension of Baby Doc Duvalier and the Ton-Ton Macoute, this is a bit of a stretch for director Wes Craven (The Hills Have Eyes), and he comes up a bit short, most embarrassingly whenever a two-fisted Harvard professor has to step in and take charge of the Indiana Jonesian heroics. (We can only hope that Wade Davis, the real-life model, would have the decency to turn from white to crimson.) The rudimentary fright gimmicks are more firmly, but not all that firmly, in grasp: as in Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street, there is so much hallucinatory horror, you hardly know when to take it for real. With Bill Pullman and Cathy Tyson. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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