Director: Ron Honthaner
Year: 1974
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
Called away to a remote house, a woman and her ancestors gather together for a will reading and find that a powerful voodoo spell has been enacted, which begins to kill them off and forces the remaining family members to put a stop to their ancestor's plans.
Review:
This here was quite the enjoyable Blaxploitation offering. One of the more enjoyable elements featured here is the fact that the Blaxploitation angle makes for an incredibly fun and enjoyable introduction to the voodoo at play. That's a big part of this one, coming off almost immediately with the opening shots of the tribal ceremony featuring all the dancers in the middle of their ritual while they prepare all the different trinkets and artifacts that start this one off on a great note. The later scenes throughout the house, where we get flashes of the ghostly ancestor rising and warding off the remaining parts of the family, offer up some really thrilling moments here, as the frequency and unexpectedness of them work, and given the inserts showing the practitioner engaging in the ceremonial practices in his room, where he has the paraphernalia laid out as he sets about his rituals, which offer some fun, cheesy thrills here.
It manages to really explore the idea of voodooism quite nicely in really letting the supernatural take over here, from the need for keeping the objects of power and control around to the matter of the controlled bodies engaging in dangerous activities through the voodoo spell, and it really gives this one the kind of building blocks to get a lot of great atmosphere here, which carries over nicely into the finale, which features some fantastic voodoo-based action here. Going from the discovery of the ceremonial chamber beneath the house, where the dancers are in the middle of their rituals with the entire room lit up using black candles, before the fine brawl and leading up into the atmospheric confrontation in the finale, it's got so much to like here.
There wasn't much of anything wrong with this one. The main issue here is the fact that the main backstory is given a really large portion of the film, which is a little weird to have. The fact that it consists of a long portion of the film is what really hurts it, since it would've been far easier had this done the simple thing and just clumped them all together in one segment without having to jump around with so many parts in different places, as it wasn't that hard to figure out anyway and didn't need the trickery into thinking it was harder to figure out than it really was. The last part here is the scene near the end where they go out on the town. Since it's so close to the end, everything has been figured out, and the horror should begin to grow in intensity, as it's after the voodoo ceremony scene, yet this one doesn't do that, and it's really hard to understand why it's even there in the first place, serving no purpose for the story and coming across as filler. Beyond these two problems, it's not that bad.
Overview: ***.5/5
A really enjoyable and entertaining voodoo-based film, this one manages to get quite likable and features enough fun moments that it all makes this hold itself up over the minor drawbacks holding it back. Those with an appreciation for this era of genre fare, who are curious about it, or who enjoy this style will have a lot to like with it, while most others out there should heed caution.
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