VooDoo (2017)

Anyone who’s paid even fleeting attention to the face of horror this past decade, particularly in the low-to-no budget direct to DVD indie realm, will be well aware that found footage has been painful in its ubiquity, and for the most part even more painful in its predictability and ineptitude. Even at the bigger budget, allegedly more prestigious end of the hall, filmmakers who take on the format struggle to produce anything genuinely effective and unexpected: Blair Witch, anyone? Subsequently, viewers going in blind (as I did) to first-time feature writer-director Tom Costabile’s VooDoo is unlikely to expect anything they haven’t long since seen time and again and grown sick to death of, and the opening half hour will do very little to convince you otherwise. However, by the final act, this take on a tired subgenre manages the near-unthinkable and genuinely catches you off guard, going to places you never would have imagined based on the early scenes. Whether or not all of it entirely works is open to debate, and there may be some more pointed questions to be asked regarding the tone and content, but if you’re a horror fan who likes to be taken on a wild ride into transgressive territory, VooDoo is definitely one you’ll want to give a look. Just don’t ask me what the spelling of the title’s all about.

That’s the short review, then. To go into a little more detail I’m going to have to get into moderate spoilers, so if you would rather go in without too much prior information  – which I would recommend – then you might prefer not to read on beyond this point.

For those of you still with us… after a sinister opening involving black magic and infanticide which seems to have little bearing on proceedings other than to forewarn us of how dark things will get, VooDoo introduces us to Dani (Samantha Stewart), a young lady from ‘N’Awlins’ who’s visiting her old friend Stacy (Ruth Reynolds) in Los Angeles. Dani’s never been to LA before, and in common with most found footage protagonists she’s excessively excited and determined to document it all on camcorder, even if that’s a bit of an old school approach in these days of camera phones. As per usual, our leading ladies are determined to part-tay, drinking, chatting, flirting with boys, briefly meeting Ron Jeremy (yes, really); but eventually it comes to light that Dani hasn’t come to stay with Stacy entirely for social reasons, but to escape a bad situation back home. Turns out she unwittingly embarked on a romance with a man who was already married, and as if that wasn’t enough of a faux pas, the guy’s wife is some sort of voodoo priestess determined to get her revenge. Naturally, Dani tries to shrug this off, but when it comes to light that the wife may have followed her to LA, anxiety sets in – and when she can’t get to sleep on her second night, that’s when the shit hits the fan.

And here’s the thing: generally speaking, when a found footage movie reaches the fan-hit-by-shit point, this typically leads to little more than thirty-odd minutes of perpetual shakeycam whilst the person behind the camera screams “omigod” every other second. VooDoo, happily, takes very much the opposite approach. Note the simple tagline on the cover art above: “you are going to Hell.” Normally one would expect that to be a mere figure of speech on a film such as this, which looks to have been made on a truly miniscule budget – but no. VooDoo takes a dramatic left-field turn around the midway point and, after a fairly effective haunted house segment, it actually follows Dani into Hell itself, where all manner of red-lit torments await; and while it all might beg the question of who’s holding the camera while all this is going on, that’s hardly the most pertinent issue by that point. Writer-director Costabile may be happy to tick all the boxes for found footage horror cliches early on, but he and his crew clearly understand that a found footage movie has to do a lot to stand apart – and, as such, a quite-literal hell of a lot is thrown into the mix. A Halloween house of horrors would be an appropriate frame of reference, but think of those insane Bible-bashing ones intended to leave impressionable young Christians traumatised.

There are, of course, a number of grounds on which we might complain of where VooDoo goes in its climactic scenes. For one, we might question just how much any of it really relates to actual voodoo, given how heavily steeped it is in Christian iconography. For another, it is again readily apparent throughout that this film was not made for a lot of money, and the at-times obvious cheapness and flimsiness of the sets, costumes and make-up can undermine the desired verisimilitude (I swear, I have never gotten more use out of that word than from reviewing umpteen found footage movies this past decade). However, most likely of all are complaints over the – ‘ulp – problematic nature of the tortures Dani endures. It may well be that we are intended to join this character on an odyssey into terror and share in her pain and despair every long minute of the way, as with Sally in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. However, given that the opening act does very little to establish Dani as anything more than another bubble-headed horror movie victim in waiting, it’s hard not to feel instead that we’re being invited to enjoy the pain and humiliation that she suffers through, particularly as the violence inflicted upon her takes a sexual turn. (Note that this review is for a US DVD release; I struggle to see this one getting by the BBFC without at least a minute or two of cuts.)

Still, providing you’re not too easily offended (a bit of a prerequisite for enjoying horror, I’d say) and enjoy the kind of horror movies that throw caution and good taste to the wind, VooDoo is absolutely one you’ll want to check out. It’s by no means a roaring success, and I’m not sure that the insanity of the latter half quite excuses the monotony of the opening, but I struggle to think of many ultra-low budget horror movies from recent years which aim so squarely for the jugular and hold on quite so tightly as this.

VooDoo comes to DVD in the US from Wild Eye Releasing on 11th September.