I like some Full Moon movies, but when they are bad, they are bad-bad-bad-baaaaad. Case in point: Witchouse, a film that deals with what might happen if the Breakfast Club got stuck in a creepy old house with a murderous witch.
They’ve all been mysteriously invited to a get-together thrown by a college-age girl who dresses like an 18th century Romanian noble. There’s a jock in the group, a couple of party girls, a pothead and not just one nerd, but THREE nerds (two spazzy guys and one dorky girl who likes to remind us that she’s a History major).
It’s your regular B-movie “party”. It’s gonna be wild. It’s gonna get crazy. And there’s gonna be, like, seven people there.
The party starts when Creepy Girl gathers everyone to hold hands around a pentagram on the floor while she tells the story of her distant relative, Lilith the witch, who was burned at the stake back in the old days. Everyone goes along with it because hey, whatever. Little do they know that they all happen to be descendents of the people who killed the witch three hundred years ago and this whole thing is Creepy Girl’s plan to resurrect Lilith (Ariauna Albright under monster make-up) so she can turn these kids into tomato paste and get revenge. Talk about a dish served cold!
I can forgive this film for the annoying characters. I can forgive it for the terrible wisecracks. I can forgive it for the clumsy closing kill (it’s shot in a couple of awkward close-ups, like they were being evicted from the set in three minutes).
No, where this movie burns its Belgian waffle is when it commits a classic B-movie mistake: It asks bad actors to act. There are long scenes here of bantering and jokes and flirting and general yapping by a cast of soap opera rejects. The result is that while this isn’t a long movie (seventy-two minutes) it feels like it takes a couple of hours before anything happens. A little nudity usually helps in a film like this, but you’ll find none of that here.
Director “Jack Reed” is really David DeCoteau, who’s made fun movies in the past, but distances himself from responsibility for this one.
Followed by two sequels.