Witchouse (1999)
WITCHOUSE
WRITERS: Original story by Charles Band
Written by Matthew Jason Walsh
DIRECTOR: Jack Reed
STARRING: Matt Raftery as Jack
Monica Serene Garnich as Jennifer
Brooke Mueller as Janet
Ashley McKinney as Elizabeth
Dave Oren Ward as Tony
Marissa Tait as Maria
Dane Northcutt as Scott
Kimberly Pullis as Margaret
Jason Faunt as Bob
Ryan Scott Greene as Brad
Ariauna Albright as Lilith
QUICK CUT: A group of friends gather for a <del>Halloween</del> party hosted by an old friend of theres, and things go horribly wrong as secrets come out.
THE MORGUE
Elizabeth - The local creepy kid, into witchcraft, lives in the spooky house, and after years apart, summons her old friends to a party.
Jack - An applied sciences major who is every ounce a nerd. Awkward, but smart, and always trying to do the right thing.
Janet - A rock and roll bad girl who is there to party.
Tony - A dopey meathead who brought the good stuff to the party.
Scott - The jock of the group, if only barely. He seems barely interested in most of the group.
Maria - Scott’s girlfriend, a bit of a ditz, and mostly there to have fun.
Brad - Mister Straightedge, a physics major, and lover of black turtlenecks.
Lilith - An ancient witch, Elizabeth’s ancestor, and not a nice person.
Run’s house!
TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back, Triskelions, and happy Halloween! This week, we turn our gaze back to our old friends, Full Moon, and David DeCouteau (Under a pen name) with the movie, Witchouse, about a bunch of people heading to a house, and getting picked off. It's NOT set on Halloween, but it should be. It really, really should be.
The movie starts off solidly enough with Bob and Margaret driving up to this old creepy house, where they were invited by a student she knew in elementary school, named Elizabeth. There seems to be no one there, as they begin poking around.
Lizzie's house is all decorated up with pumpkins, cobwebs, orange streamers, and other assorted accoutrements...and again, I stress, NOT set at Halloween. Oh, and candles. Candles EVERYWHERE. This is a fire hazard.
Damnit, Janet.
Bob sneaks off, gives the girl a bit of a scare, and then says, "You gotta check this basement out!" Oh yeah, that always ends well.
They flirt down in the musty, candlelit basement (SO many candles!) and Bob reminds Maggie how he always wanted to do it in a graveyard, and this is close enough!
Which is when someone lurks out of the shadows with a big knife, and makes stabby on the couple. I can't complain about a solid enough opening.
The murders are also hilARIOUSly casual, since it sure looks like the scenes of the killer were filmed with zero other cast members there.
Green eyed monster
After some amazing credits with laughable CGI (Hey, it was the 90s!) the rest of the canon fodder shows up to the party 15 minutes late with Starbucks.
We get our introductions, with the blonde making dopey jokes, and then commenting on how left handed people used to be considered be servants of the devil. How sinister.
Finally, Elizabeth arrives to her own party, all dressed up with no place to go. And they joke about it being a costume party. And again, NOT on Halloween.
This is my impressed face.
They compliment Liz on her decorations, and she says it suits the theme, and really! Why go through all this effort, and NOT MAKE IT HALLOWEEN?
Janet the rocker chick flirts with the physics major, asking if he can take a look at her guitar and fix it and uhhh...then the stoner tries to give him some pot to smoke. We watch as Tony the meathead acts like a total pothead who's killed a few too many braincells.
Then the final member of our little party arrives, Jennifer, and meanwhile Scott and Maria sneak off to have sex upstairs.
Now’s the time on Sprockets when we dance!!
But on their way up the stairs, Maria gives us an exposition dump that the kids used to think this house was haunted. But Scott shrugs it off, and says it's just because of those old stories that have got her so rattled.
Lizzie decides to get things started, and look, even if this IS a Not!Halloween party, when someone whips away a rug to reveal a pentagram on the floor, urging people to sit around it, that is my cue to leave.
Oh, and Jack recognises Jennifer from a class they had together last year, gets all gaga over her, and awww, nerd love.
While the one couple has sex with EVEN MORE CANDLES!, Liz has everyone gather around the pentagram and gets her Mabon party started. OOOH MABON. That almost makes sense.
Anyways, she tells about a witch, Lilith, who was going to sacrifice a child 300 years ago, but was stopped before she could complete the ritual. She was then burned for her crimes, as one does to witches.
Well, everyone sits around the star except for Sprockets, because he doesn't want to get involved in this mystical mumbo jumbo. For all of five seconds, when he sits right back down, so his complaints were pointless.
Guys! You’re missing storytime!
The exposition party goes on for a bit, and eventually Sprockets zones out with the audience and finds himself back in the past, being called Lilith, and facing all his friends in robes, doing the whole burning at the stake thing.
And as he's being cast down, I cannot believe they went and reused hell footage from Dark Angel: The Ascent. That makes me kinda angry.
Brad wakes up back in the present, scurrying away from the group and shouting about chocolate covered espresso beans.
And it was Old Man Whithers all aloooOOHH DEAR GOD THAT WASN'T A MASK!
Sprockets is nicely freaked out, and Elizabeth sneaks off to call him a cab, so the rest can party. Hmm, I'm sure she's going off camera for totally legitimate things!
While Sprockets waits for his cab, the lovenerds wander around, and Jennifer talks about how the mansion was shipped brick by brick from France to Massachusetts...and then they had the gargoyles installed, once it rose above the clouds...
As they wander around, Jack points out the wiring of the house, talking about how they couldn't wire old castles through the walls, so strung it up where they could. Mmm, yes, seduce me with your sexy wiring knowledge.
Oh, and also, this is what we writers like to call 'foreshadowing'.
Touch my monkey! Touch him! LOVE HIM!!
Sprockets sneaks down to the basement, finds Elizabeth calling to 'gods and devils' to do her bidding, and uhh, that's not a taxi company!
But what she does summon forth is her ancestor, Lilith. Will...will she help Brad get ho...oh. Nope, she's just gonna electrocute him.
Meanwhile, in the library, Jack has found a necronomicon, with a list of names, that are oddly familiar. They're all the same surnames as everyone at the party! Except for, well, Jennifer. Curious.
Bored now.
Elsewhere, a gaseous entity floats around, and finds Scott asleep after banging Maria, infests him, and turns him into a demon.
Hmm. Not!Halloween, kids gathering in a creepy house for a party, they summon forces of darkness, and they start being turned and or killed. Is this ripping off Night of the Demons??
Jack finds all this awfully suspicious, the party, the names, how they're all connected... "Do you think this means something??" *SHRUG EMOJI!*
Yay, fart car!
While they try and crack the case, Demon!Scott finds Maria, and passes an STD on to her. Sexually Transmitted Demon, adding her to the evil undead ranks.
Meathead and the Rocker hear the screams and brush it off because hur hur, they scream while having sex.
Lights start exploding as they try and find anyone in the house, but that's not a problem with ALL THE CANDLES, and eventually Lilith shows up to deal with Meathead and the Rocker.
THEY ARE! THEY ARE RIPPING OFF NIGHT OF THE DEMONS.
She next moves on to the Lovenerds, and Jack tries to use his cross and the Lord's Prayer on the witch. Which she just laughs off because her gods are far older.
With that failing miserably, they run off upstairs, while Tony and Janet try and find the demon lovers. Tony does, just in time to have his head ripped off.
Jack, Jennifer, and Janet team up to try and figure out how to get out, since they seem sealed in, and yell at each other trying to come up with a plan.
Eh, he wasn’t using it. He’ll be fine.
They run away from their possessed friends, run to the front door, but when they open it up, Lilith is waiting for them. So more running, this time to the basement!
Seeing the book, Jack grabs it to try and use as leverage, and just as they're about to run back upstairs, Janet reveals she's been possessed, or just was, or something. But she's dead now too, suddenly.
Jack stabs her with a poker, (but he hardly knew 'er!), but it has no effect on her. She throws it back at him in a pointy game of catch. And Jack, Jack goes down like a wuss.
Darla!
The possessed girl tries to blast them with force lightning (????) which Jennifer reflects back at Janet, killing her. Because okay.
Our heroes limp off towards the first floor, and they theorise getting to the attic, which was the exact way out of Night of the Demons, wasn't it?? However, in Night of the Redux, Jack is too injured to even try to climb down the side of the house.
Instead, he has a plan based on the wiring, to electrocute Elizabeth and her grandmother. And he owes it all to his degree in Applied Sciences! Yeah, because hur dur hur, it's so hard to come up with 'electrocute the shit out of stuff'.
Jack draws the witch in close, stabs her with his wired up poker, and has Jen throw ze svitch, causing her to be hit with the mother of all bug zappers.
Shocker!
After she goes poof in a hilarious stock explosion, they still have Elizabeth to take care of. But she's sure she can finish off the two injured normies.
That is, until Jennifer reveals...SHE IS THE DESCENDANT OF THE KID THAT WAS SACRIFICED! Which...really confused me, because she phrased it like that. I rewound, and reminded myself, no wait, the kid escaped. Otherwise, it woulda been hard to have kids, yes?
Also...did Elizabeth not know this? Why didn't Jennifer mention it an hour ago? That's kinda important information? Why did she keep brushing everything off as wild coincidence, if she had this secret information? If Lizzie DIDN'T know, why is Jennifer there? Why am I nitpicking logic at this stage of the game??
The two women fight over a knife, until it is expectedly plunged into Lizzie's gut, and we can get out of here.
And we shall never speak of this again.
TRISK ASSESSMENT
Video: Ehh, it’s okay, but it’s clearly another case of a VHS transfer.
Audio: Sounds fine.
Sound Bite: "Brad's a quantum mechanics major! He's gonna be the next Stephen King!"
Body Count: Delivers on amount AND percentage of cast!
1 - Bob gets knifed by the witch five minutes in
2 - Margaret joins him not soon after.
3 - Lilith electrocues Brad
4 - Scott gets possessed by the fart.
5 - Possessed Scott slays Maria
6 - Tony gets his head ripped off by Maria
7 - It appears Janet died off screen somewhere.
8 - Possessed Janet dies again from her own blasts.
9 - Lilith gets poofed away.
10 - Jennifer stabbies Elizabeth
Best Corpse: It’s gotta be Tony. Most of the deaths happened off screen, were quick and simple, or just quickly happened. But Tony? Gets his head torn off right in our faces. Sold!
Blood Type - D+: Not realy all that much blood, but a few great moments of effects.
Sex Appeal: Nothing I can recall.
Drink Up! Every time someone mentions Mabon
Movie Review: Well, aside from being overly similar to Night of the Demons, I actually surprisingly enjoyed this? You gotta take it for a latter day Full Moon film, low budget, but the story is solid enough. It’s straightforward, with a few nice swerves, a decent enough cast where it counts, and is well made. I had a lot of fun with this one. Three out of five severed heads.
Entertainment Value: The effects when we saw them were decent enough. There’s some weird stuff going on that’s fun to laugh at, and the movie is just weird enough to make you shake your head, while also being not weird enough to be bad. Three out of five necronomicons.
