There’s no denying either the heartfelt sincerity or the ambition with the impressively named James Bond III, a former child actor, attacked his only film as director, the strange, allegorical horror Def by Temptation but neither is there any denying that he lacked the resources or the wherewithal to pull it off successfully. Shot independently and picked up late in the day by Troma (it was they who changed the title from the more prosaic Temptation to the ridiculous Def by Temptation, a title that almost instantly dated it) it existed for a long time only in smeary VHS copies that did little to effectively showcase Ernest R. Dickerson’s impressive, occasionally giallo-inspired, colour saturated photography. A DVD release sorted that out but could nothing to save the leisurely and sometimes muddled plot, the variable acting or the below-par special effects.

Joel (Bond III – he was a busy man, writing, producing, directing and starring) is a young man from North Carolina studying to follow in the footsteps of his minister father (Samuel L. Jackson) who, along with his mother (Sundra Jean Williams), was killed in a car crash following an encounter with a supernatural being on a dark night-time road. Joel is suffering a crisis of faith and rocks up in the Big Apple to spend time with his childhood friend K (Kadeem Hardison), an aspiring actor. But the bars of New York are being stalked by a never-named succubus (Cynthia Bond) who has been preying on the pick-up artists and cheating husbands who hit on her night after night and who has been hovering around Joel since childhood – it was she who caused the car crash that killed his parents. As Joel falls under the temptress’ spell, K teams up with a local cop (Bill Nunn) who has been investigating the series of grisly murders that have followed in her wake to save Joel’s body and soul.

Casting for Def by Temptation was partly handled by Hush Management, a New York based company looking after the affairs of soul, jazz and hip hop artists which helps to explain not only the presence in small roles of their clients Melba Moore and Freddie Jackson but also the eclectic but poorly used soundtrack that throws in songs at inopportune moments whether they suited what was happening on the screen or not. It’s one of several technical shortcomings that keeps tripping up Bond’s ambitions, not least of which are the dreadful effects used far too freely in the climax, including a gory television-based gag straight out of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983).

But there’s also a lot going on here that’s actually quite intriguing. The first half of the film is the more interesting, as Bond focuses on the clash of cultures between the clean-living, God-fearing, if temporarily wobbling, Joel, struggling with his crisis of faith, and the temptress finding easy prey among the more loose-moraled city folk. In the latter stages it gets a bit too A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) for its own good but when it’s trying to be more Ganja & Hess (1973) than Blacula (1972), the film seems to always be on the verge of becoming something more interesting. Bond wavers in the closing stages, turning the film away from the more thoughtful and metaphysical path it was taking early on into something more box office friendly (perhaps at the behest of Troma? Who can say?) which is a real shame as the build-up is far more impressive than the pay-off.

It’s in these early stages that Bond seems to budging us towards siding with the temptress as she cruises the night life of New York City preying on lecherous sleazeballs who don’t have a shred of a redeeming feature, the sort of men who remove their weddings rings while haunting the bars in search of easy thrills. There’s some confusion as to what the temptress’ relationship is with Joel – Southern Gothic flavoured flashbacks show that she’s been stalking him since he was a child and the scenes of a black-shrouded spectre always near to the young Joel (Z. Wright), always unseen by anyone around him are fantastically creepy. And when she first sees him in the bar, she closes in with unseemly haste but the actual relationship between the two becomes muddies as the film progresses.

Cynthia Bond (one presumes she’s Bond’s wife) is fantastic as the unnamed succubus giving easily the best performance in the film. Kadeem Hardison was starring in the popular The Cosby Show (1984-1992) spin-off A Different World (1987-1993) at the time and is essentially playing the same sort of character, but his scenes with Bond – who Is sadly no actor and it seems like the worst case of vanity to have cast himself in the pivotal role – are at least well done and believable. Spike Jones alumnus Bill Nunn never convinces as a detective (in fact all too often you tend to forget that he’s a cop at all) and the prominence given to Samuel L. Jackson in the advertising is understandable but he’s barely in the film for five minutes in flashbacks as Joel’s minister father.

Although the effects-laden climax gets too silly (K’s Videodrome moment might have been more effective if it didn’t have a silly Ronald Reagan puppet cackling over the action) the film does come to a satisfyingly odd conclusion as Good and Evil face off for a final battle, Joel’s grandma (Minnie Gentry) rides to the rescue and Joel himself is last seen running through the streets, seemingly transformed into a vigilante hunting down the supernatural creatures still roaming the streets in the wake of the temptress’ depredations. It hints at the film being the first in a franchise, but it didn’t do anywhere near well enough at the box office for that and Bond never directed a film again.

Director of photography Ernest K. Dickerson – who claimed later that the direction of Def by Temptation was shared between him and Bond, the latter dealing with the actors, Dickerson handling everything else – fared better. He’d already been an in-demand cinematographer since the early 1980s, working with several times with Spike Lee but also lighting episodes of Tales from the Darkside (1983-1988), John Carpenter’s Vampires (1986) and many a rock promo video. He moved up to direction in the same year as Def by Temptation with an episode of the Great Performances (1971-) television series following Spike Lee, Debbie Allen and Samuel L. Jackson as they observe and perform with acapella vocal groups and made his acclaimed first feature, Juice, in 1992. He’s been a regular in the world of horror, directing Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995), episodes of Night Visions (2001-2002), the Snoop Dogg-starring Bones (2001) and more recently episodes of The Walking Dead (2010-) and The Purge (2018-2019).

Def by Temptation is a hard film to entirely embrace (it’s tonal uncertainty, clumsily mixing splashy gore effects, metaphysical ponderings and silly humour in such a way that never had a hope of working) but equally a hard one to completely dismiss. It has a lot of problems but Dickerson’s moody photography, the great turn from Cynthia Bond and an interesting first half that sadly loses its way by the third act all suggest that there was a better film struggling to get out here. Enjoy the weirdness of the first hour and suffer the rest, wondering just how effective it might have been had Bond held his nerve and had the money to do the story justice.