He’s A Perfectly Normal Boy! Hooptober XI
5/32 - Wes Craven/Featuring a Black Woman (Cathy Tyson FTW)

This is not in most people’s top tier for Wes Craven, but for most of the movie, it is perhaps his most complex and unvarnished story. Loosely based on real life events, Bill Pullman is the discoverer (survivor?) of indigenous substances for big pharma, before we called it that. For most of the movie, I was recasting Pullman in my mind— Michael Douglas? James Spader? — but you have to hand it to the guy, he gets put through the WRINGER and has the balls (scrotum?) to go back to Haiti, which is where the wheels fall off and Craven bows to the American cinematic machine for a heroic ending. 

Cathy Tyson, Zaikes Mokea, Paul Winfield (always getting himself controlled by crazy men!), and Brent Jennings deliver powerful performances that keep the movie on the ground even as it spins into the spirit world. Not Craven’s most cohesive movie, but like Red Eye, one of his most underrated.
 

*note: I replaced Cursed in my list to stay closer to my theme.