As someone who counts themselves a fan of the big-haired Tawny Kitaen-led 1986 original "Witchboard," I was not particularly enthused by the promotional material for this remake, but I felt a duty to give it a chance, especially given Chuck Russell's horror credentials. I will preface this by saying that I went into this with extremely low expectations. Is this remake high art? Absolutely not. But for sheer entertainment value, I was pleasantly surprised.
The story here takes the bare bones of the original film (with a few visual nods and recreations of scenes from the source material), setting it in present-day New Orleans where a young woman, Emily, crosses paths with a historic "pendulum board." As she and her chef fiancé prepare to open his new restaurant, Emily becomes overtaken by the board which possesses supernatural powers.
While the original film was not exactly known for its subtlety, Russell's reimagining is outwardly garish and plays with a lot of familiar witchcraft tropes and cliches in a manner that may cause some eye-rolling, though the handling of the material was less outrageous in some aspects than I anticipated. The screenplay is far from perfect, though, despite some trite dialogue here and there, I felt the story moved forward at a breezy pace. The history of the board itself and its association with a powerful witch takes center stage here, drawing us back to 17th-century France in a timeline-shifting plot thread that allows for some surprisingly well-orchestrated period set pieces. There is also a unique theme at play revolving around the history of Christian institutions surreptitiously co-opting and dabbling in the very dark arts they purport to condemn, something you rarely see explored in films of this type. These sequences are well-staged and at times reminded me of the period Hammer films of the 1960s and 1970s.
The performances here are decent given the material, with Madison Iseman giving the strongest turn in the film as the troubled Emily. Iseman evokes a natural guilelessness that is appealing, while also managing to strike the appropriate sinister chords as she literally loses possession of herself. Jamie Campbell Bower plays an occultist/New Age pagan with a vested interest in the board, and his performance is stagy if not amusing. Where the film suffers I think is its overzealous use of digital special effects, which give it a rather silly visual flair that recalls the cheapjack direct-to-video supernatural fodder of the 1990s. Whether this throwback element is intentional or not is difficult to say, though I believe the film would have been much better off without it. Still, there does remain a novelty aspect to seeing something of this nature on the big screen in 2025--and to be honest, it is perhaps not more egregious than a good deal of what we see studios like Blumhouse churning out year after year.
An amusing dinner sequence leads into a finale that is staged quite goofily to say the least, and there is a denouement that is equally goofy despite hearkening back to the aforementioned theme of religious institutions' interests in (and ostensible adoption of) the occult. At face value, the entire thing is admittedly ridiculous, but I can say that I was very much entertained by this film. I went into it with the expectation that it would be a chore to sit through, but I did not have that experience. While it is flawed, I think it is ultimately a decent if not campy reimagining of the original story. To think that a B-movie like this could claw its way to theaters today is a bit of a shock--what's more shocking to me, though, is that, despite being a fairly jaded horror fan, I found it an extremely watchable and reasonably entertaining popcorn movie. Check your expectations at the door and you may have the same result. 7/10.
