The audience for The Alchemist is, admittedly, limited. But those who remember hokey 80s bum-budget fare fondly will probably be fairly tolerant of this unspecial Charles Band outing.We're introduced to a hitchhiker, John Sanderford, who gets picked up by a cute waitress, Lucinda Dooling, who's been having occult visions that interfere with her driving. Meanwhile, fleshy-faced Robert Ginty, star of one of the quintessential cheapcrud vigilante films, The Exterminator, here has an even more lowbrow role as a man plagued by a werewolf-like curse. Somehow, this quasi-werewolf glassblower's destiny seems to be linked with that of the waitress, who bears an uncanny resemblance to his dead wife. Robert Glaudini, weird star of Band's lurid masterpiece Parasite, has a small role as the title character (?).If all of that sounds complicated, don't worry, because it isn't. The Alchemist is pretty casual viewing, fairly uneventful, actually, and won't appeal to people with 21st century attention spans. Those who stick with it, however, will at least be treated to a gateway to Hell, a couple of neat if not particularly formidable demons, and maybe a few moments approximating scares. Tame as a whole, The Alchemist does have some brief gross/gory scenes; my favorite is the white and green slime oozing out of a dead demon's head.A guilty pleasure - one for all you Bandites out there.

In 1871 a man gets cursed by an evil magician who basically condemns him to a life of hell where he will live forever knowing that the love of his life is no longer with him and not only does he suffer the loss he finds himself becoming a monster at times and he has no control over the transformation. 80 years later his daughter, who is now an old woman and looks like his grandmother, uses a spell to try and transfer the demon curse from her son to a new unknown source. That unknown source just happens to be a lady (who looks just like the mans dead wife) who is in town looking for a place left to her. The transformation is not entirely completed and the plot gets rather confusing, but at the end demons come out and the magicians curse is lifted...confusing!! I had watched this back in about 1990 and didn't recall a second of it except the old woman. It is extremely confusing and hard to follow at times. The hitchhiker the girl picks up adds a funny twist to it and the weird demons are kinda cool. This movie is so cheesy, but it makes it one of those bad/good sort of films.Band directed it and of course he is a horror movie icon, but he offered little here. The acting was okay, but the films production values were below standards. It is good horror cheese from the 80's though so watch it with a bit of room for mistakes, it isn't perfect and it isn't horrible, it's just fun, boring at times though. 3/10 stars

This is a low budget movie, but the people who made it seemed to want to do a good job. The sets and location are good, the photography is very good. You care about the main characters. The special effects aren't state of the art, but are good. Worth seeing.

Okay, so the acting was pretty bad, but this film had a weird and interesting storyline. One of Band's Original Empire Pictures releases, this film is interesting and mostly enjoyable. I found the scenery and locales to fit the storyline perfectly. People say it "doesn't get worse than this", but this is not so. I've seen much worse. Though some of the film drags on and gets boring, it still should manage to keep most patient people's interest. Not great, but not awful-especially for a B-Movie.**1/2out of****OKAY Writing, BAD Acting