House of the Witchdoctor

The lowdown is... this is an attempt to make a Rob Zombie-style grindhouse horror movie... by someone with absolutely no clue of what makes those films work.

Really, I'll watch some awful horrid garbage and manage to find SOMETHING I liked about it... but I just could not manage that here. Mostly I'm going to blame the writing/directing. Nearly all modern movies look fairly decent... good technology and loads of film school graduates who know how to use it (even if they haven't a clue how to tell a story). The acting... it was hard to tell. A lot of it seemed awfully flat... but the script was so utterly putrid and it's not apparent there was an actual director on set... so... I'm loathe to blame the performers.

Just plain bad... and not even the fun sort of bad.

A group of 5 college-aged kids go to spend the weekend at the house of one of their parents. Before they get there, they stop in town for something to eat. Two of them are confronted by a man who was recently released from prison, along with his demented side-kick. After that scary incident, the group of kids get in the car and continue to their destination. The parents are a bit creepy, but nothing is really thought about it, and the parents leave the house for the evening, leaving the kids alone. Just by chance, the ex-con and his friend are driving by, trying to find a house to rob, when they come across the place where the kids are staying. They break in and the fun begins.

This is a slasher, but not in the typical sense. Usually, a slasher is a movie with an unknown assailant. In this movie, it's very obvious who the killers are. There are the typical slasher props of blood, boobs, butts, gore, 3 rape scenes. Considering that this was low budget, they were a bit graphic, and - like all rapes scenes - were a total turn-off to me. There are also some typical clichés, such as the most commonly used; the phone not working. Another of the clichés is when the victims have the chance - the very definite chance - of killing the badguys, they simply smash them in the face or the nuts or try strangling them instead of using the knife to do the job quickly. All of that gives the badguys the ability to overpower the kids and...well, do their horrific best on them.

I did not like this. The two boyfriends were the most useless people in the entire movie. They make a point of showing how muscular one of them is, but when the badguys break into his room and grab his girlfriend, they don't have any weapon out at that time, and the big, strong boyfriend doesn't even try pouncing on them.

To some extent, this was a movie where the characters - specifically the goodguys - did such stupid things, I had to really laugh. But all-in-all, the movie, especially the ending scene in the basement, was not at all what I thought it would be, nor did I like it.

I gave this a 4-star rating because the acting wasn't that bad, considering it was low budget, and I think one has to consider that when rating these things. The cinematography was pretty good. The storyline...not so much.

The Plot:

Evil wreaks pure havoc and bloody murder upon Leslie Van Hooten, a beautiful young girl, and her unsuspecting fellow grad students as they make their way to her family's extravagant and yet isolated estate.

Peter (Bill Moseley- Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D, House of 1000 Corpses) and Irene Van Hooten (Leslie Easterbrook- The Devil's Rejects, Police Academy), the young girl's mother and father, leave the group alone for the weekend, so that she may mourn the anniversary of her boyfriend's shocking murder.

But the peaceful weekend soon turns to hell when they find themselves being savagely terrorized by Cliff Rifton (Allan Kayser- Night of the Creeps, TV's Mama's Family), a crazed and recently released career criminal, and Buzz Schenk, his drug addict side kick whom are hell bent on raging a torturous killing spree.

OK. So this is one of those one-year-later movies that's been done a hundred thousand times before.

It's very slow in the beginning. Painfully slow with boring melodic music.

Then it takes a weird violent turn but it's still not very interesting. It fact, it turns stupid. And back to being excruciatingly slow.

The acting is an abomination. The inevitability factor is non existent.

The movie truly sucks.

Most Horror movies nowadays suffer from a complete lack of originality. House of the Witchdoctor doesn't. It's an entertaining, evil little bugger with teeth. And guts. And, of course, it has Bill Moseley.

The storyline is a nice twist on the usual "Five friends spend the wekend and get butchered" theme. There's also some really bad acting, especially the two evil guys display some extremely funny buffoonery, but this, too, is fun to watch. At least if you don't have a problem with trash, cause this is basically a Trash movie with a better budget. I think most Horror fans would enjoy the ride, you get your share of blood and gore, some laughs (a lot of laughs actually) and, um, Bill Moseley. Did I mention that before?

If you like 80s Horror as I do, you might also notice the smell of those days that reeks from this movie. Which is a good thing.

Badly written, badly paced and badly acted.

It's like they had 30 minutes worth of material and tried to spread it out into an hour and a half. Much of the dialog seemed ad-libbed or written by someone who doesn't actually interact with other people.

The plot was forced and the "twist" was so obvious as to not be a twist at all.

The only slightly redeeming part of the movie was Bill Mosely and even that seemed forced.

The ending was so hokey and again seemed made just to lengthen the film.

The final ending was laughable. Bad.