Director: Tom Costabile
Writer: Tom Costabile (Screenplay)
Starring: Samantha Stewart, Ruth Reynolds, Dominic Matteucci, Daniel Kozul, Ron Jeremy
Plot: When Dani, an innocent southern girl, vacations to Los Angeles to evade her increasingly complicated life, she learns that escaping her past isn’t as easy as she hoped.
There may be spoilers the rest of the review
Verdict: Poor Man’s Baskin
Story: VooDoo starts when Dani (Stewart) arrives in LA to stay with her cousin Stacy (Reynolds) for a month to see what the Hollywood lifestyle is like, Dani is portrayed to be an innocent girl but that is wrong she is just like her cousin. Dani has escaped her home town to recover from a bad break up where she has been cursed by the wife of her ex-boyfriend who happens to be a Voodoo Priest.
Dani’s trip takes a turn for the worse when she discovers the wife of her former lover in also in LA and she can’t escape the past that has been cursed upon her with a demon following her every move, waiting to take her to hell.
Thoughts on VooDoo
Characters/Performance – Dani is portrayed to be from New Orleans, an innocent young woman who is happy to act like a party animal freshly out of a relationship with a married man, this character is very, very annoying because she is way too tourist to put up with. Stacy the cousin is the rocker who we never seen play any music so I guess she is just the tour guide for the first part of the movie.
Performance wise well, I hate saying bad things about actress just making their way in the business because they are only just starting their path, but I really can’t see Stewart or Reynolds getting many roles in mainstream films because Stewart just crying and screaming for the last half of this film just isn’t scary.
Story – The story is based on watching a revenge of a woman whose husband cheated on her with our main character using all her voodoo gifts. The first half is all meeting Dani while the second half is all her time in hell paying for what happened. This is a very visual horror so the story doesn’t need to be too deep.
Horror – I can see a market in the horror world for this film, I really can this has a lot of visually hard to watch horror moments that some people will turn away from but for me this was just a horror that wanted to shock as much as possible but didn’t always get it correct, for a similar story I would say Baskin is far superior when looking at entering into hell.
Settings – The LA setting is fine, we gets a tourist experience but the more interesting setting is the design of the hell Dani finds herself going through which is dark, disturbing and most of all shocking.
Special Effects – Certain moments of this film are CGI effects that you can see come through badly, while when the film turns to practical effects we are filled with shocks in what we see.
Final Thoughts –This is a film that is hard to watch movie, this is because the first half is all talking with the second all hell based, the director new what he wanted and will satisfy the horror corner that will like this style of horror.
Overall: This wasn’t for me but it does have shocking moments in the final half of the film.
Rating
