Full Moon Pictures | Through the Shattered Lens

When I first started writing for Through the Shattered Lens, I wasn’t sure how long my reviews should be. I went over to Rotten Tomatoes and I read their guidelines for reviews and I discovered that a review should be, at minimum, 300 words long.

300 words? I thought, I can do that!

Truth be told, sometimes I can’t. Sometimes, you see a movie where it’s a struggle to even come up with 300 words. When that happens, I resort to filler. I’ll tell you about my weekend. I’ll tell you about a funny thing that happened to me in high school. I’ll give you a long-winded story about my early days as a TSL reviewer. I’ll do whatever I need to do to make sure that I can reach at least 300 words.

The importance of filler was clearly on the mind of David DeCoteau when he directed the 1999 film, Witchouse. (And yes, that’s how the title is spelled.) Typically, a film has to run a minimum of 65 to 70 minutes for it to be considered a feature film. Witchouse features three minutes of opening credits, three minutes of closing credits, and a lot of stock footage from a film called Dark Angel: The Ascent. In fact, the film uses the Dark Angel stock footage not once but twice. The finished film runs 72 minutes so obviously David DeCoteau and Full Moon Pictures got what they needed out of all that filler. Fortunately, the audience gets what it needs as well. Witchouse is a film that announces from the start that it shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

The film takes place at a mansion in Dunwich, Massachusetts on a stormy night. Elizabeth (Ashley McKinney) has gathered together a group of friends for a party. When her friends arrived, I assumed they had all gone to high school together. Imagine my surprise when I learned that the characters were all supposed to still be in high school! Elizabeth wants to hold a seance so that she can contact the spirit of her ancestor, a witch named Lilith (Ariauna Albright). Centuries ago, Lilith was burned at the stake. Elizabeth is hoping to bring Lilith back from the dead and she’s willing to sacrifice her friends to do it. Her friends, for the most part, just want to have sex in a big creepy mansion and who can blame them?

If this plot sounds familiar, it’s probably because the story itself was largely lifted from Night of the Demons, with the horribly burned Lilith even resembling the decaying Angels from Kevin Tenney’s classic shocker. Witchouse is never quite as much fun as Night of the Demons. For instance, there’s nothing in Witchouse that can match the subversive oddness of the lipstick scene from Night of the Demons. At its best, Witchouse is occasionally atmospheric and it features decent performances from Ashley McKinney and Monica Serene Garnich. At its worst, the film is kind of boring.

That said, I will give Witchouse credit for totally frustrating my autocorrect. How does one pronounce Witchouse?

1999’s Totem opens with a young woman named Alma Groves (Marissa Tait) running through the wilderness.

She runs until she reaches an isolated cabin. Entering the cabin, she finds five other people have already arrived. She doesn’t know who they are and they don’t know her. In fact, she doesn’t even know why she suddenly felt the need to stop eating lunch and to run until she found the cabin. She’s not even sure how she found herself in the wilderness to begin with. Everyone else at the cabin has a similar story. They were all going about their day until, suddenly, an image of the cabin entered their mind and they felt compelled to run until they found it.

At first, Paul (Jason Faunt) comes across as being a chivalrous and friendly jock type. Leonard McKinney (Eric W. Edwards) is a cocky womanizer who is upset that he was compelled to leave in the middle of having sex (or so he claims). Robert Cole (Tyler Anderson) is the angry rebel who is reluctant to talk about his past. As for the other women, Roz (Sacha Spencer) is sarcastic while Tina (Alicia Lagano) is a seemingly innocent high school student. Along with Alma, the six of them are trapped in the area by an invisible force field.

While trying to determine where the invisible barriers have been placed, the six of them come across a cemetery and three sinister-looking statues. As the night continues, it becomes clear that, whenever someone dies, one of the statues comes to life. But why are there six people and only three statues? “Three to be killed and three to kill!” Robert says.

Directed by David DeCoteau and produced by Charles Band’s Full Moon Pictures, Totem is about as incoherent as you would probably expect from this production team. However, it’s a cheerful sort of incoherence, one where the confusing story is at least told with some energy and the entire thing has a “make it up as you go along” sort of feel to it. It’s remarkable how the people in the cabin keep figuring out all of the extra rules that determine how the three killer statues work. Myself, I sat through all 68 minutes of this film and I’m still not quite exactly sure what was going on. That said, the confusing nature of the story works to the film’s advantage. At its best, Totem manages to achieve a sort of dream-like intensity. Who hasn’t had that dream about finding yourself in the middle of nowhere with absolutely zero clue how you got there or how to get home?

You know what else works to this film’s advantage? That 68 minute running time. The film essentially feels like an extended episode of an old horror anthology show. Think of it as being a bloody episode of something like Night Gallery or Tales From The Crypt. It’s a piece of gory fun that doesn’t really require too much of the audience. It’s cinematic junk food and that is definitely meant as a compliment.