PopHorror Let's Get Scared
When I was in the seventh grade some of my classmates went and saw Witchboard one Saturday night and were talking about how awesome it was that Monday morning at school. I didn’t get to see it until it was released on VHS months later, but after I finally got to see it, I loved it and thought that it was one of the best horror movies I’d seen in a long time. Since I was so into it (and am generally not a fan of remakes) I wasn’t too pleased last year when I heard that it was being remade as it just seemed unnecessary as the original film still holds up quite well after all these years.
I tried to be optimistic about it after I heard that Chuck Russell was directing it as I dig his movies, but in the back of my head I had a little voice telling me that I wasn’t going to like it. I decided to give it a shot and hoped for the best, but as I sat there waiting for the movie to start that nagging voice kept telling me that I was making a mistake and that my initial feelings about it were correct.
So, was that little voice in my head right or did I end up being surprised by how much I liked it after everything was said and done?
Keep reading to find out…
Synopsis
A recovering drug addict who is helping her fiancé open a new restaurant in New Orleans discovers a spirit board in the woods and unleashes the spirit of a witch queen after she starts using it obsessively. Unfortunately, she isn’t a good witch queen and soon people around her start dying.
Chuck Russell (our interview) directed the film and co-wrote it with Greg McKay and Kevin Tenney.
Let me just start out by saying that I really enjoy Chuck Russell’s previous works. I think that Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is one of the best films in that series and that his 1988 remake of The Blob is criminally underrated and deserves a lot more love than it gets. He’s a talented filmmaker and has done some great things during his career, but sadly Witchboard is not one of them. I had a lot of trouble getting into this movie and if you ask me, nothing about it seems to quite work.
One of the biggest problems I had with it is that for a supposed remake, it has almost nothing to do with the original film. Remember when they remade Prom Night several years back and it had nothing to do with the original film other than the fact that it took place at the prom? That is essentially what happens here as there are only a few things that take place in this film that are even remotely close to the original (such as the main character using the board to find her ring and then later becoming obsessed with the board and using it a lot more than she should).
Instead of the ultra-cool evil spirit of an axe murderer terrorizing the characters in this movie we get a sort of lame evil witch running around knocking people off. It just doesn’t work for a few reasons and comes off like a cheap imitation of countless other horror movies that revolve around a Ouija board or some type of evil spirit coming back from the dead for revenge. I honestly wonder if it wasn’t supposed to be another movie entirely but the people behind it decided to slap the Witchboard title on it to cash in on the original.
I also just wasn’t feeling the characters whatsoever as most of them are just as bland and cookie cutter as you can get that are more forgettable than anything else. Madison Iseman (Fear of Rain, Anabelle Comes Home) does a decent job as the main character and does the best she can do with what she has to work with, but I don’t think anyone will ever say that there is anything that stands out about her. Aaron Dominguez (Breathe, Katie’s Mom) is just basically there to play the main character’s fiancé, and he doesn’t really do much more than that (and actually looks like he would much rather be somewhere else in most of the scenes that he is in).
While Mel Jarson (Mortal Kombat, Blacklight)’s character Brooke is a little annoying and just there so we would have someone in the film who was knowledgeable about the supernatural she is nowhere near as bad as the film’s secondary antagonist played by Jamie Campbell (Stranger Things, A Haunting in Wicker Park). His character is so bad, it is one of the main reasons I didn’t care for the movie in general, and I was really wanting to fast-forward through every scene that he was in.
Poor Antonia Desplat (Made in France, The Killer’s Game) tries her best as the big bad Naga Soth, but it just doesn’t quite work, and the character is just an inferior replacement for Malfeitor from the original film.
Did I mention that the CGI is terrible in this film? It looks extremely bad, and I don’t know why the people behind it didn’t opt for practical effects. They even use CGI blood, which is never a good thing. The effects look cheap and silly, and there is a part where someone is having a hallucination and sees a guy ripping his face off that is so laughably bad it must be seen to be believed (and don’t get me started and the atrocious horned devil guy that shows up at one point). I don’t like CGI in general and have always said that there was absolutely no excuse to use CGI blood as it always takes me out of the movie and this film is a perfect example. I am not trying to be that guy, but I have honestly seen better CGI effects in some commercials.
As you can see, I was not a fan of Witchboard at all. It’s way too long, there are issues with pacing, and the premise just isn’t that interesting or original at all. While there are a couple of good scenes (the guy getting killed in the kitchen is fun and the who restaurant massacre bit was cool) there isn’t a whole lot to really enjoy about this movie (oh, the cat though, I did enjoy the evil cat that shows up and it was probably my favorite character in the whole film).
I have a hard time recommending this movie, especially to those who are fans of the original, and didn’t have a good time watching it. While it is awesome to see Chuck Russell making movies again, I just think that he may have made a mistake by doing this one and hope that his next one is a lot better. In short, skip this movie and watch the original from 1986 as it is a thousand times better in every possible way (Heck, even the two sequels it spawned are better than this movie, and neither one of them is anything to write home about to be brutally honest).
