Skip to main content

Bustin' Makes Me Feel Good [Review: Witches Brew]

A ghostbusting team consisting of a TV presenter (director Eileen Daly), a medium and a defrocked priest investigate a demon-infested castle - and their innermost desires. The mysteriously aged proprietor and his two succubus nieces give the ghostbusters the runaround while they search for a way to lift the curse. I say they... the duty falls mainly on Eileen as her two male co-ghosthunters are smitten with the nieces and unable to concentrate on the job. However when all seems lost the team benefit from the help of a passing demon-hunter and her remarkable iPhone app.

Witches Brew, screened at Horror-on-Sea 2018, is a movie that will infect you with its joy even as it challenges you with its rough edges.

Some directors and producers are so obsessed with perfection that they edit, re-edit and re-release their movies again and again in search of that ultimate, overproduced director's cut. Not Daly. Mistakes and mis-takes are seen throughout the movie - light and sound change from scene to scene, body-hair prostheses fall off the cast. This is not carelessness or ignorance. It's not satire. It's simply two fingers up to the perfection-obsessed zombie filmmakers (Prooooductioooon vaaaaaluuuuues...) - Daly makes the sense of fun her star - she could cut the mis-takes out but it's much more enjoyable to keep them in. 


Witches Brew is a loveable movie in its own right. Also, without being a direct parody it somehow brings back pleasant memories of The Rocky Horror Show, the original Wicker Man, and curiously the ancient TV series Rentaghost. I can't explain this, and I don't need to.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I've Got A Brand New Alien Harvester [Review: Evil Aliens]

Sometimes you need to turn your brain off and just watch something stupid and bloody... Evil Aliens is a comic horror film from 2005 starring Emily Booth as a cynical TV journalist and featuring Red Dwarf's Norman Lovett sadly only in a minor role. Booth and her crew are sent to investigate an alien abduction story on an isolated Welsh farm, accompanied by an eccentric UFO expert played by Jamie Honeybourne. It soon becomes clear that the aliens are somewhat hostile, and the film progresses into a series of close encounters of the messy kind. This film is an unashamed gorefest, and it's very clear the budget has been spent mainly on realistic blood-and-guts effect shots which are detailed, delightfully inventive and utterly gratuitous. Everything else is cheaper - the script is perhaps not as fine tuned as it could be, the aliens appear to have bought cheap Predator costumes on eBay and rendered their spaceship CGI on Microsoft Paint. The acting is all hammed-up melodrama but i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bright Eyes [Review: Humans episode 3]

I'm enjoying Humans more with each episode. I like the easy Asimov references. I like the way different characters get to show new depths or aspects of their personality each week - and the way, each week, we get a more disturbing version of what synths can do, whether limited to their original programme like NHS droid Vera (Rebecca Front) or whether illegally modded or freed like Niska (Emily Berrington). Last week Niska discovered she could kill - this week she makes her bid for freedom and starts to explore the world. It turns out she has some scruples, or at least limits on what she's prepared to do. Emily Berrington as Niska Anita (Gemma Chan) is still the central character. It's becoming clear how good she is at lying and manipulating her owners - but she's different from the other synths, and when Mattie (Lucy Carless) tries to hack into her system, just for a few seconds we get a hint of what she really is. It's compelling viewing, gradually building into a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Boy You Turnin' Me [Review: Upside Down]

Adam and Eden, the hero and heroine of French film “Upside Down”  are star-crossed lovers, the poor boy and the rich girl. Just like Romeo and Juliet, Laura and Alec or Megashark and Giant Octopus, they live in different worlds – no, they literally live in different worlds, one suspended above the other and each with its’ own gravity.  When Adam (Jim Sturgess) last saw Eden (Kirsten Dunst) she was falling upwards towards her own world and to her death.  Years later, when Adam discovers that Eden is still alive and working for Transcorp, a mysterious company whose offices link the two worlds, he comes up with a crazy plan to win her back. Adam and Eden strive to escape the limitations of their societies and geometries, so Upside Down is Science Fiction . “Upside Down” tells a simple and rather traditional story of love across the class divide, with a crude and obvious use of metaphor. Good performances from Sturgess and Dunst can’t cover over the lack of depth in the writ...
Post a Comment
Read more