I always thought that there was a line which filmmakers would not go below, as far as 'star power' movies go. Movies which rely on the fame of their lead actor/role as the main drawcard are rarely any good, but I always thought that there was a certain level of competence to them all. I've seen Vanilla Ice spout 'drop dat zero and get wit da hero' in 'Cool as Ice', and it was not pretty. I've seen Britney Spears recite poetry from her personal book in Crossroads, and that was not good either. And I've seen Hulk Hogan dressing up in a ballerina costume for 'Mr. Nanny' and that needs no comment. But all of these movies managed to maintain a certain level of competence. Granted, it was not a high one, but it was still there. And Da hip hop witch was the first movie I've ever seen which stooped below that line.
To try to give an outline of this movie (movie is a loose term as there is no story), it's necessary to first try to understand how it came about, otherwise an explanation of this mess of scenes would be incomprehensible. I can see numerous ways, but the most likely is that the director/writer is a friend of eminem, and came up with the idea of the hip hop witch as a take off. He probably took up a few minutes of eminem's time, and got him to speak about some hip hop witch, and then I'm guessing the idea grew from there, and he asked various rappers to comment on it. After a while he would have had a good 30 minutes of comments by rappers, some very famous, about the 'hip hop witch', and he figured that knocking together some half plot and releasing the 'star studded' film would mean instant success. This is only an hypothesis, but would explain what we have here.
And what do we have here? The answer is.A complete mess. We have eminem who is obviously improvising his entire speech, the thing would probably go on for a good 20 minutes and he continues to repeat his lines as he thinks of the next thing to say, changing his story as he goes along. The other rappers are no better, for people who are or were 'scared to death by the witch' they seem to find the whole thing remarkably funny, they laugh while describing their 'horrible near death experiences'. Most of the rappers feature fleetingly, ja rule would only be on screen for 30 seconds but is credited as the second lead actor, which was obviously for the 'star power' motive.
And then we have the other part of the movie, which fills it in making it a 'releasable' 80 minutes. We have the 5 kids who hear about the witch and go to jersey (I think) to hunt her down, we have a reporter who wants to dig up information about the hip hop witch, and we have the record producer who is secretly faking the whole hip hop witch thing while noone realises. These characters are all arbitrary and serve only to fill in time, we are treated to a long and pointless scene where the reporter argues about a promotion, another scene where she hides papers in the photocopy room, and then these groups start interacting to waste even more time. Then, we are informed the 'street don' has been killed, which I'm sure is terrible news, but it would be sadder if we knew who he was. This time wasting continues in this roundabout fashion which I find probably the most frustrating aspect of any movie, especially in an era when most filmmakers are unable to shorten their films below 2 hours. Just about the only interaction we do not see is anyone mentioned in this paragraph with any of the rappers. We see a reporter standing outside a door, saying 'we are outside shady studios, where eminem has locked himself inside for fear of the witch, allowing in only our cameraman', which just goes to show that he had no interest in making a good film or spending any time shooting. The rest of the rappers are exactly the same, only ever seen on camera giving conflicting evidence, never seen talking to anyone. This just further goes towards proving the hypothesis.
But the hypothesis really doesn't matter. What matters is that this is a terrible movie. The camerawork is awful, perhaps as they were aiming to imitate the blair witch project, but in that movie the camerawork was believably bad, in this the cameramen run circles and do gymnastics around the target, seemingly aiming to induce migrains. The acting is bad by the 'cast' and unspeakable by the rappers, who obviously do not care at all. The plot is non existent, the dialogue terrible, basically any aspect of filmmaking here either does not exist or is so bad it's not worth mentioning. One does begin to feel sorry for eminem as one can see that he was just joking during his 'performance', and had no idea that it would end up in this form. It's the nerve of whoever released this that really disgusts me, stooping to a level so low to make money based on eminem's face. Watching this film just really feels wrong, like it is so bad that it never should have been released. I do hope, and pray that nothing this bad will ever be made again, and can only recommend that noone waste their time on this plotless rubbish, unless they want to see a group of rappers improvising a string of 4 letter words. Disgraceful.
