House of the Witchdoctor (2014)

I love this movie so much

That was an excellent one.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

While the twist ending is one decent twist, the hour and fifteen minutes that comes before it drags this film down, down, down. Bad acting, bad directing, poor effects and two bad guys who are obviously rip offs of the two bad guys who have a REALLY bad day in A History of Violence (except their acting stinks), drag this down. At lengths boring with a bit of nudity to spice it up, this barely helps the watcher to enjoy this. So what might have been a decent movie just spirals down into a below average waste of time.

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.

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.