PopHorror Let's Get Scared
Voodoo has long since fascinated the general population. Its mysticism and supernatural emphasis makes it seem magical and taboo to most people. People forget that Voodoo is an actual religion that has its reaches from the southern United States to Cuba, Haiti and the Caribbean and stretching all the way to Africa, where it originated. Modern Voodoo is a mixture of African folk beliefs and Catholicism, and has been turned mostly into the subject of horror films and novelty, as indicated by the 2016 movie VooDoo.
VooDoo was written and directed by Tom Constible and stars Samantha Stewart as Dani Lamb, Ruth Edwards as Stacy Cole and Constance Strickland as Serfine L’Amour. The story follows Dani, a young woman from New Orleans who goes to Los Angeles to visit her cousin, Stacy. During her visit, she gets a call from her ex-boyfriend, Frank, who tells her that his wife (that Dani didn’t know of until after the relationship had started) was in LA, and that she has voodoo powers. It would seem Frank’s wife, Serafine, is hell bent on revenge for Frank and Dani’s affair.
Personally, I find the Voodoo religion fascinating, and I love when movies include it… when it is done correctly (I think The Serpent and the Rainbow did it best). Now, I’m not a Voodoo expert by any means, but I saw a LOT of problems with its usage in this movie. Normally, I really enjoy found footage movies, even the ones considered awful, but this one was just too bad to love. During the slow beginning of the film, we are introduced and made to follow the two least interesting people in the entire universe with the two most fake southern accents I’ve ever heard. The dialogue is so boring that you can’t even for a second connect to the characters long enough to give a single shit about them. Nothing happens for a good 45 minutes, Dani gets the call from Frank and then all hell breaks loose. It’s at that point that a terrible movie somehow gets worse.
Samantha Stuart is better at acting scared than any other emotion on the spectrum, but then she becomes a caricature of what a scared person is, screaming non-stop for the second half of the movie. There are zombies (a wide Voodoo misconception), and I’m talking the violent ones, not the spiritually subservient zombies that we tend to connect with Haitian Voodoo, as well as feral cave people, anal rape, demon rape, pedophilia and 45 minutes of unnecessary violence that lost my interest after the first disembowelment (and who the hell is filming at this point?). The walls are painted with occult imagery and 666, which has no relation to Voodoo despite its connection to Catholicism courtesy of Marie Laveau.
VooDoo is a gross misrepresentation and sensationalizing of what Voodoo is, and it’s not even good at doing that. The story makes no sense, the characters are uninteresting and the evil bits have no relation to the title. The term “Voodoo” is used to falsely make the watcher think we are going to see something more psychological and mystical along the lines of The Skeleton Key, and what we get instead is a ridiculous demon movie with drums and gratuitous gore. This movie was made purely for shock value, and it doesn’t even succeed at that. If you’re interested in learning about Voodoo, I highly suggest a reputable source. Don’t let poor excuses for horror movies misrepresent a religion that has already been commercialized for tourism. This movie is a hard pass for me but, if you decide you want to see it, it is available to stream digitally now and will be available on DVD September 11th.
