House of the Witchdoctor (2014)

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.

This film proves that you don't need a big budget, or fancy special effects to create a great movie. I loved the way it kept shifting between sub-genres, shifting from slasher to revenge to... well, I'm not quite sure what I would call where it ended up. That shift kept me guessing the whole time, which is a rare and wonderful feature in a movie.Although the gore is minimal and not particularly graphic, there is a considerable amount of nudity and fairly graphic sexual content that might make this an uncomfortable movie to watch with the family.As for the acting, I had no real issues with it. The characters were not complex, as is to be expected in a horror film, and the actors handled them just fine.If you enjoy horror movies, this one is definitely worth watching.

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.

I enjoyed this film very much. It was terrifying, full of gore and even a splash of dark magic, but still grounded in human emotion and completely tasteful. The violent and sexual scenes were relevant to the story and well executed. And there were moments of subtle humor that gave a momentary reprieve from the heavy atmosphere. The acting was strong - I believed every scream. David Willis was exceptional as Buzz, possibly my favorite character. This film is one of the best of its genre that I've seen in a while; I was beginning to think there weren't any good horror writer/directors left out there. I highly recommend seeing it to anyone who can handle graphic images.