VooDoo, 2016.
Written and Directed by Tom Costabile
Starring Samantha Stewart, Ruth Reynolds, Daniel Kozul, Constance Strickland, Dominic Matteucci
SYNOPSIS:
An innocent Southern girl hoping to evade her complicated personal life travels to Los Angeles to stay with her cousin. She soon begins to learn that escaping her past isn’t as easy as she hoped…
At its best, VooDoo offers a surreal nightmarish polarity between the world of Los Angeles tourist attractions and the possessed carnality and devilment working its spell underneath. Transposing the world of voodoo to LA and Hollywood provides a raw seediness to proceedings, with a hallucinatory glow filtering the camera snaps that the main character is filing of her trip. The film is a tale of two halves – with the first showcasing small-town girl Dani’s (Samantha Stewart) excitement to be in the hi-glo glamour of the big city, and the second exploring the various grimness and depravities of Hell itself.
Looking to escape the jealous attentions of her ex-lovers wife – who may or may not be a voodoo high priestess – Dani turns up at her cousin Stacey’s (Ruth Reynolds)house in need of friendship and a break from the recent past. The two enjoy night’s out around the local club scene, shopping trips and quite a few deep and meaningfuls. However, it soon becomes clear that that the troublesome wife – the wonderfully named Serafine L’Amour (Constance Strickland) – is not going to easily give up on extracting her revenge from Dani. And so the holiday spirit becomes fairly short lived and Dani’s time away rapidly descends – quite literally – into a living hell…
VooDoo is an enjoyable piece of weird horror, most memorably managing to visualise a prolonged spectacle of hell that goes well beyond what many would expect of the low budget and VOD style. While the trashier elements of the production are glaringly apparent, this does not detract from the hyperactive strangeness on show. The length of time given over to documenting the Underworld is in itself unusual, and helps mark this title out as something a little different. The weaker aspects, as may be expected, are in the scripting, dialogue and acting, but even with these frailties the bad trip intensity and dark humour at work make this an intriguing chapter in new horror.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert W Monk is a freelance journalist and film writer.
Originally published January 15, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
