review for Faust: Love of the Damned on AllMovie

Goethe's epic Faust has been made into more than 50 films, but this certainly must be the only one featuring a scene in which a woman's breasts inflate around her until her face is barely visible above the quivering flesh. Clearly, this one is based on a (very) graphic comic book series, not a confusing, wordy, literary roadblock. In this case, the Faust of the title is a nutcase who winds up with The X-Men's Wolverine razor hands and, near the finale, realizes 1) he's not a minion of the Devil sent to cut up innocents; he is the Devil and 2) bad guys make far more satisfying targets. Once Mark Frost dons the red rubber devil garb and turns into a version of Him from The Powerpuff Girls, he becomes more superhero than monster, which rather confuses the protagonist/antagonist tension that's required for a satisfying resolution. Not that this matters to kitchen-sink director Brian Yuzna, who is going for the same arch and camp franchise possibility he stumbled onto with Re-Animator; the story is spliced up like the ingredients in a Cobb salad -- the very definition of "meandering" (flashbacks will do that, you know). On the other hand, horror fans will find much to their liking if they can get used to a demon who spits out very funny one-liners like, "I make such a mess when I play," as he stands amid the gore of a freshly butchered victim. The editing is so stroboscopically kinetic it makes The Crow look like slow motion. Check your brain at the door and eat up this grisly eye candy.