Salem Witch Doll

Returning home from college, a dropout trying to reconnect with her family to decide what she wants to do with her life starts to believe a family curse involving a witch curse and a dangerous living doll is the cause of a series of strange visions she has forcing her to uncover the truth.

This is a dull and generally uneventful effort without much going for it. The fact that there's just nothing happening for long spells in the film with only the intermittent dreams about a masked figure going around the compound killing her in various positions around the house grounds which get intriguing enough only to be essentially written off as her just acting up based on the troubled nature she has coming home. This goes along with a series of listless, boring, and flat-out dull interactions that take place with the family going from their history together or trying to put her down for dropping out of college which are so plodding there's little about this that becomes interesting or enjoyable. That these manage to overwhelm the film's running time for so long means it has nothing in the way of genuine horror thrills for nearly the entire running time. With the focus on setting up banal family melodrama interspersed with just slight glimpses of an admittedly creepy wooden doll looming around the property, it becomes a struggle to stay invested in this one as nothing is going on outside of conversations for the most part. It picks up slightly in the finale when it finally decides to introduce a witch controlling everything going on and brings about some violence in their interactions with everyone while also showing some disharmony with everyone to create some mistrust, but it's all too little too late to save this dull and cheap-looking piece.

Rated Unrated/R: Violence and Graphic Language.

Granted, I have to admit that I harbored zero expectations to this 2024 horror movie as I sat down to watch it here in 2025. Why? Well, the movie's title and cover just wasn't exactly screaming stellar horror movie. But as the old saying goes 'don't judge a book by it's cover', then of course I gave writer and director Daniel Yates's 2024 movie a fair chance. Sure, I had never heard about the movie prior to watching it, so I didn't know what I was in for.

The storyline in "Salem Witch Doll", however, fell way, way short of entertaining me. It felt like a very disjointed storyline, as if writer Daniel Yates didn't really know in what direction to take the movie, and trying a bit of too many things, but accomplishing nothing in the process. I was not entertained by the storyline and narrative in the movie.

I was not familiar with a single actor or actress on the cast list. And I will say that the acting performances were fair enough.

The movie does have a lot of nice scenic shots, which looked great, but hardly were important to movie, aside from establishing that the family were somewhere in the wilds, far away from civilization.

The music in the movie was insanely annoying. It was way too loud, over-dramatic, and was essentially almost just noise. It grew very tiring listening to that during what was supposed to be dramatic or scary scenes, as it ended up ruining the mood of the scene.

My rating of "Salem Witch Dolls" lands on a two out of ten stars.