31 Days of Horror(1)

I’m starting to feel the burn folks, 13 days in and this is getting tedious. It doesn’t help that I’m watching the late-90s/early ’00s stuff where the company ran out of money and stopped caring. So hey, here’s Witch-Owse, this probably won’t suck, right? I’ma go fix myself a drink, be right back.

tusk

A group of college kids go to a creepy mansion during a thunderstorm on May Day to attend a party thrown by their friend Elizabeth. There’s stoner, jerk, jerk’s girlfriend, smart guy, rebellious chick, smart-alec, etc. Elizabeth is a weird goth chick and she wants everyone to sit around a pentagram and perform a Mayday ritual. This congregation of dipshits is gathered here to serve as meat for the grinder.

Elizabeth summons her ancestor Lillith Le Fay for revenge because in a shocking twist, all the people at the party are descendants of the people who killed Lillith!  After a lame summoning ritual, the group splits up and wander in groups of two around another person’s house as one does during a party.  Finally nearly 40 minutes into this 72 minute movie, Lillith shows up to silence the braying jackasses.

Oh wait no, she takes care of the least annoying character and then more-or-less disappears while they prattle on some more.  The protagonist couple of sarcastic smart guy and cute bookish girl keep meeting cute and it tests the limits of insufferability.  After turning a few kids into witch-people we finally get a proper confrontation where rebellious girl hucks her guitar at Lillith as she levitates menacingly at her.  Naturally the witch with the powers of the universe is stopped by shutting the door and locking it.

More people get witched, tortured dialogue gets spoken, bad special effects happen, Dutch angles attack the audience’s senses flanked by generic tense music and near-incessant thunder sound effects.  Then rebellious girl turns into a demon-witch and the voice distortion software almost manages to hide the horrible lisp that her scary demon teeth give her, then the two combine to make her completely unintelligible.  After an anticlimactic confrontation with a half-assed science vs. magic message, the movie mercifully ends and I don’t have to watch it anymore.

All of the actors in this movie are awful, just atrocious. The women are specifically awful and the fact that everyone’s already playing an asshole just makes it that much worse.  The dialogue is written by someone who clearly thinks they’re very clever but coming from the mouth of these drama class rejects it feels like ground glass on my eardrums.

The camera rocks back and forth constantly as if indecisive about what Dutch angle it wants to use, the special effects make-up is halfway competent but is really just as derivative as the movie itself.  It’s boring, poorly paced, badly acted, even more badly written, and just bad.  Just watch Night of the Demons, people, it’s so much less awful.

Watch, Toss, Or Buy? TOSS!

If You Liked This, Watch: The Convent (2000), Night of the Demons (1988), Night of the Demons 2 (1994), Night of the Demons 3 (1997), Night of the Demons (2009), Demons (1985), The Hazing (2004), Wishmaster (1997), Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988)