House of the Witchdoctor

This is not a great modern-day horror movie, but it is a very effective one that I'd put somewhere between "House of 1,000 Corpses" And "House of the Devil", but also with a little rape-revenge thrown in. It has a very effective atmosphere with two college-age couples accompanying their friend "Leslie Van Hooten" to the wintry, isolated home of her parents on the anniversary of her boyfriend's death. It then turns into a pretty harrowing rape-revenge film when two criminals show up, who one of the couples had earlier tangled with. Rather than becoming a slick modern-day torture porn at this point though, these scenes have the more gritty feel of something like "Last House on the Left" (the 70's original). The movie then takes yet another turn, however, into a more "House of the Devil" territory, as is given away by the title (and perhaps the name of the main protagonist).

The characters are little more well-drawn than in other movies. They're college graduates and seem a little smarter than usual. One couple is the typical pair of horn-dogs who can't stop humping each other, but the other pair are Christians who spurn pre-marital sex (more unusual and more interesting). This doesn't mean that ANY of them are necessarily going to come out too well though. This also has an interesting scene where one of the rapist-murderers gets out of prison and stops to visit his deeply religious mother. It's unusual to give a character like this any kind of third dimension, but it actually makes the things he does later more disturbing.

The name actor here is Bill Mosely ("House of 1,000 Corpses"), who plays the "Van Hooten" father, but special mention must be made of the unknown cast of young people and the "democratic" use of nudity. The three girls all get naked. Nudity is pretty necessary here--you can't really make a harrowing rape-revenge film while pussy-footing around actresses' "no-nudity clauses". But even if some scenes are a little gratuitous, well, all horror movies today seem to have gratuitous (as in pretty unnecessary to the plot) sex scenes and shower scenes like this, but a lot of times they do them WITHOUT nudity, which is both pointless and annoying. Besides, the female characters are also the most well-developed and interesting--they're not just porn star types with fake looking breasts who are obviously just there to get naked. Calle Stephens and Emily Bennet are slightly better actresses, but Summer Bills deserves some mention, not just for being a very appealing little cutie, but I never would have found my way to this movie except I saw HER on the Investigation Discovery channel portraying the girlfriend of XXX superstar/possible murderer John Holmes (the same character played by Kate Bosworth in "Wonderland") and I was curious what else she was in. It's a pretty dumb motive for watching a horror movie maybe, but, hey, it worked out OK.

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.

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 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.

The lowdown is... this is an attempt to make a Rob Zombie-style grindhouse horror movie... by someone with absolutely no clue of what makes those films work.

Really, I'll watch some awful horrid garbage and manage to find SOMETHING I liked about it... but I just could not manage that here. Mostly I'm going to blame the writing/directing. Nearly all modern movies look fairly decent... good technology and loads of film school graduates who know how to use it (even if they haven't a clue how to tell a story). The acting... it was hard to tell. A lot of it seemed awfully flat... but the script was so utterly putrid and it's not apparent there was an actual director on set... so... I'm loathe to blame the performers.

Just plain bad... and not even the fun sort of bad.