The Coven

The woods at night. A bunch of teenagers up for a bit of fun and some truth in the historical facts of this story all make for a horror film that is safe for your Tween to watch. My daughter loves the Mackie twins and of course wants to watch anything with them in so I was relieved to find the story, which has it's base in reality, provided a gentle horror with no gore or unnecessary bad language and she really enjoyed it. Judging by the credits this film looks to be something of a family affair! I kind of liked the idea of a family spending time together making a film. I also liked Dexter Fletcher and his Harry Potter style classroom. Clearly a low budget film, there were no earth shattering special effects or graphics, just honest and basic story telling.

...as an example of why nepotism needs to be completely eradicated for the good of humanity.

Watching this, I found myself wondering why whoever was in charge of the casting for this film had hired 3 kids with no acting ability whatsoever alongside a bunch of noticeably more competent actors.

Cynically I thought to myself "meh, the kids in question are probably related to the casting director or something". So as soon as this dreadful film finally came to an end, I popped onto IMDb to check if my suspicions were correct.

Indeed they were, in fact it seems this entire film was something of a family project; the director being John Mackie, the writer being Jayney Mackie, and the three similarly talentless kids being Cloe Mackie, Holly Mackie, and Billy Red Mackie. Oh and there's even a Rory Mackie listed as the "digital imaging technician".

A crappy film is one thing, but depressingly this also reflects one of the biggest problems we face as a species in this day and age: many people performing the most important jobs in the world are only there because of family connections and inherited wealth, titles and opportunities, rather than getting there on their own merit.

So thank you to The Mackie Family for spearheading this deepest of social problems that our world is currently riddled with; I realise it wasn't your intention to do so, but your efforts illustrate beautifully why this rigged and unjust system needs to be destroyed by any means necessary.

This was one of the worst movies I have seen. Boring and a total waste of time.

Some of the information mentioned in the film (which I wont give away) was completely and utterly stupid and wrong. That aside, the film wasted too much time on the girls when it could have spent more time giving the audience more of the history of what actually happened in the past.

There were times where I felt that the girls didn't feel like acting and slurred their lines, sometimes a little difficult to understand as well.

The teenage boy (where the hell did they find this one) was not convincing and you just wanted him to vanish.

Finally, there were scenes where you were able to piece together the story and once you got that, a sigh of relief that you made it through to the end. It was hard and managed to keep my hands away from the remote control. The stop button was calling out to me.

Blair Witch meets The Craft ...... School girls vs the mystery in the woods. Nothing new, nothing interesting and nothing special.

Watch your cat sleeping, it's more entertaining.

I don't even know why I watched this, I mean from the first 5 minutes the acting quality was at an all time low, along with the poor scripting. I have honestly seen better media projects recorded by high school students. Sometimes I wish we could give a 0/10. Why Dexter Fletcher agreed to be in this I really have no understanding, work cannot be that hard to come by you'd put appear in this. And then to see why it's a family project just makes me feel like they didn't take time or effort to cast some better people. This could have gone so right but it went so wrong, just because either overly estimated ambition from the director/writer.

I gave it a "2" because it simply isn't the worst movie I've ever seen, but it's pretty lousy. I knew we were in for a stink-fest when the movie opened with a guy dressed up like Doctor Who teaching a class on Wicca and then a witch comes in and her eyes turn red and bulgy. It looked like something out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The CG was pretty bad and the acting was subpar. The plot is almost nonexistent.

This is not the kind of movie I would watch unless someone made me. If someone makes you watch this film, then they probably hate you.

As has been stated elsewhere, this is basically a "found footage" film. (Why do they keep remaking Blair Witch Project? I understand that it's much cheaper to disguise poorly shot digital footage as "amateur video" but hasn't this run the course yet? Why was Paranormal Activity able to turn a profit and command a series of sequels? Why do people pay to watch mediocrity? Am I reading too deep into this?)

Anyway, I never found out what happened to the girls. I stopped caring long before.