, Morgan Galen King and Philip Gelatt’s “The Spine of Night” is nothing less than an orgiastic ode to Ralph Bakshi, Gerald Potterton, and the other god-kings of rotoscope animation whose adult cartoons glistened from behind the beaded doorways of America’s video stores like forbidden relics that would melt the faces of anyone who dared to gaze upon their taboo wonders.
It’s nothing more than that, either, but there’s only so much you can ask of a movie in which Lucy Lawless voices a naked swamp witch who wears a human skull as a headdress and shouts things like “tremble before the immensity of the night!”Even if “The Spine of Night” struggles to align its overarching story with the anthology-like shape that it takes, it’s still rare and rewarding to watch a film that makes so few bones about what it wants to be — all
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