Ryan Scott Greene | 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?

First released in 2004, Irish Eyes tells the story of two brother, born eleven months apart.

Tom Phelan (John Novak) is the older brother, the one who is destined to go to law school, join the Justice Department, and to marry Erin (Veronica Carpenter), the daughter of one of Boston’s most prominent attorneys. Tom’s future lies in politics. As he makes his reputation by taking down members of the Boston underworld, he finds himself being groomed for attorney general and then who knows what else.

Sean Phelan (Daniel Baldwin) is the younger brother. Haunted by the murder of his father and stuck at home taking care of his mother (Alberta Watson) while Tom goes to college, Sean soon pursues a life of crime. He falls under the influence of the Irish mob, led by Kevin Kilpatrick (Wings Hauser). Sean quickly works his way up the ranks. It doesn’t matter how much time he does in prison. It doesn’t matter how many people he has to kill. It doesn’t matter if it alienates the woman that he loves or if it damages his brother’s political career, Sean is a career criminal. It’s the one thing that he knows. When Sean finds himself as the head of the Irish mob and also the American connection for the IRA, his activities are originally overlooked by his brother. Sean even threatens a reporter who makes the mistake of mentioning that Sean and Tom are brothers. But soon, Tom has no choice but to come after his brother. What’s more important? Family or politics?

Obviously (if loosely) based on Boston’s Bulger Brothers (Whitey became a feared criminal while brother John became a prominent Massachusetts politico), Irish Eyes doesn’t really break any no ground. Every mob cliché is present here and so is every Boston cliché. Don’t rat on the family. Don’t betray your friends. The only way to move up is to make a move on whoever has the spot above you. Every bar is full of angry Irish-Americans. Every fight on the street turns deadly. Everyone is obsessed with crime or politics. The film, to its credits, resists the temptation to have everyone speak in a bad Boston accent. (The Boston accent, much like the Southern accent, is one of the most abused accents in film.) Sean narrates the films and you better believe he hits all of the expected points about life on the street.

That said, it’s an effective film with enough grit and good performances to overcome the fact that it’s just a wee predictable. Daniel Baldwin is appropriately regretful as Sean and John Novak does a good job of capturing the conflict between Tom’s love of family and his own political ambitions. Curtis Armstrong shows up and is surprisingly convincing as a psychotic IRA assassin. Admittedly, the main reason that I watched this film was because Wings Hauser was third-billed in the credits. Hauser only appears in a handful of very short scenes and that’s a shame. In those few scenes, he has the rough charisma necessary to be believable as the crime boss who holds together the neighborhood and it’s hard not to regret that he didn’t get more to do in the film. That said, the film still works for what it is. It’s a good mob movie.

This film was originally entitled Irish Eyes. On Tubi, it can be found under the much clunkier name, Vendetta: No Conscience, No Mercy.