J.R. Bookwalter took the directorial reigns from David DeCoteau for this limp sequel to producer Charles Band’s Witchouse.
Unmarked graves are uncovered in the backyard of an abandoned mansion. Since the place is the future site of the new mega-mall, that means the owners want the grounds investigated, pronto. While examining a skull, the lead investigator accidentally cuts her finger and gets some bone dust in her wound. Soon, she becomes a raging bitch to the members of her team, but they later discover she isn’t a bitch, but a witch. Or at least she’s been possessed by one. The same witch, in fact, that was killed in the mansion centuries ago. She then sets out to turn the rest of her team into witches and plots her revenge.
It's been a while since I saw the first Witchouse, so I’m a little fuzzy how all this connects back to the original.
The opening scene has a lot of Found Footage/Blair Witch-style hokum, but it’s not too bad. From there, the film goes back and forth between the documentary crew filming interviews about the mansion and “real” scenes of them investigating the corpses. Honestly, Bookwalter should’ve stuck to one format or the other. The Found Footage stuff (while far from the worst I’ve seen) ultimately feels like padding and the interview sequences could’ve been snipped away without anyone missing them. These scenes bloat the running time to ninety-eight minutes, which is about twenty minutes longer than it really needed to be.
I did like the scene where the camera battery dies near the end, which forces Bookwalter to finish it like a “real” movie. The make-up on the witches is kind of cool too. (I dug their glowing eyes.) However, these fleeting moments come a day late and a dollar short. Of the cast, only Andrew Prine is memorable, playing a dual role.
The climax is weak too, and the movie suffers from a weird look. Many of the “real” scenes are slightly blurry and/or feel like the actors are speaking and moving at a slower rate than they should be. It’s almost like you’re watching it at .75x speed. Even if you watched it at twice that rate, it wouldn’t have ended fast enough for me.
AKA: Witchouse 2. AKA: Witchouse 2: Blood Coven.
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