YMMV / The Serpent and the Rainbow

• Awesome Music: The end credits theme by Brad Fiedel (of Terminator fame).
• Complete Monster: Captain Dargent Peytraud is the leader of the Haitian Tontons Macoutes and a practitioner of Voodoo. To keep Haiti's population in line, Peytraud uses a special drug to steal people's souls and make them appear dead. The ones who don't suffocate after being Buried Alive are exhumed and turned into zombie slaves. When anthropologist Dr. Dennis Alan comes to Haiti to investigate, Peytraud brutally tortures him by hammering a nail into his genitals before haunting Alan's dreams, filling them with nightmarish visions of the walking dead and later frames him for murder to force him to leave town. Eventually, Peytraud uses his magic to control a woman in order to make her murder Alan. When Allan returns he uses the same trick on his ally to make him decapitate himself and then drugs Alan and places him inside a coffin with a tarantula. When he and Alan finally square off at the end, he tries to perform a human sacrifice on Alan's beloved Michelle by beheading her.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Mozart, the wily creator of the zombie powder who gets some good Enlightened Self-Interest moments.
• Funny Moments: At the start of the film, Dennis Alan drinks a potion and hallucinates that he gets into a fight with a leopard, only to befriend it instead... then it cuts to the shaman who gave him the potion, watching as he rolls around on the grass by himself.
• Magnificent Bastard: Louis Mozart is a Haitian chemist who sells a rare paralyzing agent that makes victims seem dead for days as their Buried Alive while still conscious. Mozart can expertly make the real chemical but often sells actual poison (which is cheaper and easier to make) in its place, killing the victim quickly and painlessly while the customer is none the wiser. When Dennis Alan picks up on his con game, Mozart engages in a Battle of Wits with him, but is impressed at being repeatedly bested and makes Alan a real sample of the substance, while believing that Alana intends to use it to kill afeared and hated Secret Police leader. When he learns that Alan really wants to use the chemical as a safer form of anesthetic, Mozart is amused at the idea of becoming famous for doing something good and helps Alan smuggle the potion past the Secret Police without even demanding his full original payment. When he's facing execution because of this, Mozart tries to bluff his way out of trouble, but does so without losing his composure and dignity.
• Nightmare Fuel: Fed up with Alan's meddling, Peytraud has him kidnapped and tortured him by hammering a large nail into his penis. And this was Peytraud's idea of a warning.
• Spoiled by the Format: When Alan makes it back to America after only about an hour and ten minutes it’s easy to expect that there’ll be more to the movie

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