Witchouse3DemonFire

Witchouse 3 Demon Fire (2001)

The movie opens with Annie being smacked around by her boyfriend/husband (never quite sure) who questions why she is out so late at a pottery class. Annie packs her bags and leaves for her friends place. There she walks in on Stevie and Rose shooting some video for Stevie’s documentary on witchcraft. After a few drinks they try to do a spell for the camera, and it seems they invoke a powerful witch, quite by accident. Soon this witch, Lilith, is stalking the women and making threats. But are they really seeing a witch or is someone messing with them? Could the whole thing be their imaginations running wild after a night of drinking?

I’ve always been a fan of J.R. Bookwalter, who directed this movie, from his early direct to video work. That is exactly what this movie plays like, a cool direct to video horror release from the 80s. The story is straight to the point and keeps things moving along. This makes for a fun little flick that never gets slow or allows the audience to lose interest. After watching as many low budget movies as I have this is really appreciated. Now to be fair this is far from a perfect movie. There are fairly large plot holes and I didn’t like the twist ending much at all. Also a couple of the characters have sudden and dramatic changes in their personalities that I just didn’t get at all. I can’t really go into too much detail without ruining the plot. But I will say that in spite of some plot issues I still enjoyed the movie. As I stated the movie has a real late 80s early 90s direct to video vibe (in spite of being made in 2001) that it made me feel just a bit nostalgic for those days.

I challenge anyone to show me a better independent filmmaker from the 80s and 90s who could shoot a better movie than J.R. Bookwalter. Here again he makes the most of his limited budget with scene after scene of creatively staged and well light shots. One of my biggest complaints about many low budget movies is that you can’t see what is going on half the time. Here that isn’t an issue, and there is even some effective use of smoke machines and strobe lights. I was disappointed in the lack of gore. There really isn’t much in the movie beyond some blood spread around on a body here and there. The makeup on Brinke Stevens is also sort of cheesy, but that works nicely with the rest of the movie.

Witchouse 3 is the sort of movie that you just need to kick back, turn off the part of your brain that is picky about plot lines and wallow in it’s cheesiness. If you can do that then I think you’ll have some fun with it. For more information check out the Tempe website at http://www.tempevideo.com/

2 ½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer