House of the Witchdoctor

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.

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.

I stumbled upon the 2013 horror movie "House of the Witchdoctor" in 2020. And I hadn't even heard about it prior to finding it by random luck. I saw that it was a horror movie, and when I saw that Bill Moseley was in it, I just had to sit down and watch it, as I think he is usually good in horror movies.

Without knowing anything about "House of the Witchdoctor" there was no expectations to the movie, so writer and director Devon Mikolas had a clean slate to impress me with.

As it turned out then "House of the Witchdoctor" was a sort of boring movie and it was definitely a generic horror movie, as it offered no surprises along the way. Everything seemed to follow a very over-used formula of how-to-make-a-horror-movie. And it didn't really work out well in favor of the movie.

The storyline was bland and mediocre, and it didn't help much that the characters were equally pointless and bland as the storyline was. And not even iconic Bill Moseley could do much to lift up this particular movie.

For a horror movie then "House of the Witchdoctor" is not a movie that is worth the time, effort or money, to be bluntly honest. Some of us suffered through the movie so you don't have to.

I am rating this movie a mere three out of ten stars. Hardly a noteworthy addition to the horror genre, nor a milestone in Bill Moseley's acting career. This is not a movie that I will be returning to watch a second time.

First off, this is possibly the worst movie EVER made, but don't miss it. I cannot begin to describe how bad it is, but it ends up being the funniest slasher, voodoo, deviant, horror movie ever produced.

The cast is amateurish, the dialog is hysterical ('Nobody rapes my friend, scumbag!") and appears to have been made up on the spot. And then there are the facial expressions...priceless! And the plot...what plot? AHAHAHA!

The only thing funnier than this movie are the glowing phony 10 star reviews on here.

Just gather some friends, bring in a supply of liquid refreshments, sit back and be prepared to laugh your butt off!

The reviews for this certainly made me anticipate it more. As it is, it's not the usual horror flick you'd expect, but because I kept reading about its originality, I was disappointed in where it did go. It just seemed like too simple a set up, not to mention very obvious, since the film clearly doesn't hide that its hiding some secrets and it sort of becomes apparent early on with a glance exchanged between two characters. Still, the film works despite of itself, and the two leading male antagonists are quite good here, and seem to actually be having a lot of fun which helps the film's energy.Overall, nothing all that great or even all that good, but worth it.