George Taylor
While the twist ending is one decent twist, the hour and fifteen minutes that comes before it drags this film down, down, down. Bad acting, bad directing, poor effects and two bad guys who are obviously rip offs of the two bad guys who have a REALLY bad day in A History of Violence (except their acting stinks), drag this down. At lengths boring with a bit of nudity to spice it up, this barely helps the watcher to enjoy this. So what might have been a decent movie just spirals down into a below average waste of time.
arfdawg-1
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.
torreyian
This film proves that you don't need a big budget, or fancy special effects to create a great movie. I loved the way it kept shifting between sub-genres, shifting from slasher to revenge to... well, I'm not quite sure what I would call where it ended up. That shift kept me guessing the whole time, which is a rare and wonderful feature in a movie.Although the gore is minimal and not particularly graphic, there is a considerable amount of nudity and fairly graphic sexual content that might make this an uncomfortable movie to watch with the family.As for the acting, I had no real issues with it. The characters were not complex, as is to be expected in a horror film, and the actors handled them just fine.If you enjoy horror movies, this one is definitely worth watching.
AliceCraven
The first half of House of the Witchdoctor hearkens back to the uncomfortably gritty ultra- violence of 1970s films such as "I Spit on Your Grave" and "The Last House on the Left." The final act of "Witchdoctor" eschews the standard rape-revenge formula in favor of the occult and supernatural, and delivers quite a bit of unexpected humor in the process. Solid performances from a great horror cast make this a joy to watch. Allan Kayser is convincingly savage in his role as one of the criminals. Bill Moseley and Leslie Easterbrook deliver darkly humorous performances as suburban parents with a twisted secret. Genre fans may also recognize Dyanne Thorne of "Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS" in a bit part as a neighbor.
AD
