WITCHTRAP

WITCHTRAP is the film that killed my first VCR. I arrived home one Saturday afternoon, a bag full of tapes in my hand. My mom was going out with my aunts. My sister was busy with her boyfriend. My dad just wanted to be left alone. I had the run of the place. The living room belonged to me and me alone. So down I sat, hopefully for some great bared breasts and awe-inspiring spilled blood. I popped WITCHTRAP in the VCR and it roared to life. I reached the 20 mark of the film when suddenly the VCR made a horrible, mechanical noise, what I imagine an Autobot fart would sound like had Autobots possessed bowels and assholes. And then… nothing. The tape lodged itself deep inside the guts of my beloved VCR, strangling it to death.

And somehow this was all my fault.

I got yelled at quite a bit that day. Did I push the tape in too hard? Was I fucking around with it as it played, maybe dropping it or throwing it against the wall? Nope. I just put the damn tape in and was sitting there waiting for the inevitable display of nudity from Linnea Quigley when the damn thing just died. The video rental shop made my dad buy a replacement copy of the film. From the growls he made into the phone, it couldn’t have been cheap. We would have to wait a full two months before the repair shop called and informed us that we could pick my dearest friend from the hospital. Those two months were the longest two months of my life. 

I never did get around to finishing WITCHTRAP. I had never bothered to rent the film again. I’ve never been the superstitious type, but I feared what would happen if I rented it again and tried to watch it. Maybe this time it would catch fire instead of simply getting wrapped around the heads and pulling them out of place. But here I am today with a shiny, new Blu-ray/DVD combo pack copy of the movie. I decided to watch the DVD on my old laptop just to be safe.

Well, my old laptop survived the experience unscathed, but my brain cells sure didn’t. WITCHTRAP is an exceedingly stupid movie, horribly acted and written to boot. The plot is 45% The Haunting of Hill House, 5% GHOSTBUSTERS (no joke, there are ghost traps in this movie) and 50% bullshit. A group of special investigators spend the day in a supposedly haunted Gothic mansion in an attempt to prove the existence of evil spirits, all so the owner of the property can repackage the place into a haunted bed and breakfast tourist trap. The leader of the investigation is Dr. Agnes Goldberg, a spiritualist who is also, for no apparent reason, an atheist. Her husband, a mental medium, tags along, as does Whitney, a physical medium (and yes, the film explains the difference). Oh, and Linnea Quigley plays a video technician named Ginger whose sole job is to set up a single tripod, easily the best bit of casting in the entire film.

Then there’s the trio of security officers, one of whom is a skeptic with a bad attitude, a personality quirk that got him fired from the police force even though he’s apparently so damn good at his job that he can crack a 20+ year cold case in 8 weeks. They’ve been brought along to ensure the safety of the Scooby Gang, though I’m really not sure what good a gun would do against the ghost of an ex-serial killer warlock. But as there is a creepy, overweight peeping tom / groundskeeper wandering around, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Truth be told, there’s a bit more going on in WITCHTRAP than you might expect. There are discussions of reality, the nature of belief and even a brief debate on theodicy. There is a short conversation about evil and whether evil is a kind of metaphysical force or merely a product of human nature. There is talk of God and the devil and the afterlife, and all the other bits and pieces of discourse that might pop up in a film all about conflicting metaphysical points of view. Shame then that the dialogue doesn’t adequately address any of those topics, coming off as middle school banter rather than educated thought. It also doesn’t help that the actors are all stiff, their voices all dubbed by people who sound like they were just woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of their careers crashing and burning.

The dialogue in this film swings wildly, sometimes risible, often times atrocious, sometimes a bit racist, and often times damn near unintelligible. Every character is flat and lifeless, with motivations that change from scene to scene. According to IMDb, the screenplay for WITCHTRAP was completed in just six days and hot damn, does it show. The dialogue is so unbelievably stilted and devoid of nuance. If you took a foreign screenplay and sent it through Google Translate, this is how the dialogue would read. There isn’t a single line in this film that feels natural.

But then again, nothing in this film feels natural. Nothing even makes sense. I could fill three reviews with all the inconsistencies and unexplained shifts in motivation. I could fill the next paragraph without trying, just rambling off things that either make no sense or ruin the tonal consistency of the film. Here, watch me go.

Oh man, supernatural stuff is going down, better call the police. Oh no, we just found our friend dead in the bathroom, better keep ghost hunting. Oh no, we just found that one cop that we all hated dead in the bedroom, better get out of the house quick. Damn, the gate has been padlocked, I guess I won’t bother climbing that four foot wall right beside it. There’s a car speeding towards me!, better not try to move out of the way. Bullet hits the gas tank of a van, van doesn’t explode. Bullet misses the van entirely, van explodes. This urn is clearly the source of the warlock’s power, better just leave it on the mantle place. Oh no, someone stole the battery out of the car, better not just walk off the property. Phone’s dead!, sucks that we’re like a half mile from town. Behold! I’m an all-powerful Satanic warlock reborn in the flesh, guess I’ll just punch this guy to death. I’m an atheist, though I still believe in Satan. Man watches as a knife is magically thrown at him from halfway across the room, nah there’s gotta be a rational explanation for that.

This movie sucks.

I know a lot of people will watch WITCHTRAP and walk away thinking “wow, what great schlock!”. No, sir. This isn’t great schlock. This is what schlock looks like once the sell by date has passed. This is rotten schlock, schlock that needs to be thrown away. This movie could have been fun were it not for the fact that it is so damn incompetent. There is no pulse to it, just 90 minutes of boring bullshit and badly executed sight gags. Worse, about 70 of those minutes are shot in the day time so all attempts at atmosphere and spooks are for naught. You can’t be scared when the movie looks THIS bad. You can’t be entertained when every single line of dialogue sounds THIS bad. And no, you can’t make it all better by having Linnea Quigley strip down for a shower scene or include a shot of a man’s head exploding. You can’t wallpaper a turd.

WE ARE STILL HERE

Paul and Anne Saccehtti are a middle aged couple still reeling from the accidental death of their son, Bobby. To aid in their coping, they've purchased a home in a quiet New England town, possibly in Massachusetts. Deeply spiritual, Anne believes she can feel the spirit of Bobby in their new home, but Paul, ever the skeptic, thinks she is just hanging on to her grief. After a quiet couple of weeks, they meet two of their neighbors, Dave and Cat McCabe, who fill them in on the disturbing history of the previous owners of their home. It once belonged to the Dagmar family, a reclusive bunch that were run out of town when rumors sprung up that the head of the family, Lassander, the local mortician, had been selling the corpses he was supposedly burying to some “university over in Essax County”.

In the days after the visit, things at the Dagmar house go from quiet to disquieting. The smell of smoke fills the basement and the repairman called in to service the old boiler is found in shock, his arm burned during an encounter with something evil lurking in the shadows. Anne invites her spiritualist friends, Jacob and Mary, to spend some relaxing time with them, but Mary feels an evil presence haunting the home. Before long, Anne and Paul are not only under siege from vengeful ghosts, but from a town full of people eager to keep a long-standing promise to something far more evil than what lurks in the basement of the Dagmar house.

Now, if you're at all a fan of Italian horror, you'll know exactly where this film is going just from reading that synopsis. WE ARE STILL HERE is a rather obvious love letter to Lucio Fulci's THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY. It even includes a few Lovecraft references (that “university over in Essax County” would be the Miskatonic), a whole subplot lifted from THE WICKER MAN, and a few nods to newer horror films, especially THE CABIN IN THE WOODS. And therein lies the problem. For all its Fulci references, explosive gore, and haunted house cliches like possession and seances, the real heart of the film is rooted in a human drama dealing with loss, grief and the need for emotional closure. Those two narrative threads, the human and the horror, clash constantly during the films running time.

There isn't a single moment in this film where the narrative feels comfortable with itself. There isn't a single moment when all these individual strands of story coalesce into something actually meaningful. It's a Frankenstein's Monster built of disparate elements that are given constantly shifting priority as the film goes on. That leads to some rather shockingly inept lapses in logic. There are moments when the film just stops making sense altogether, as if the writing was done on the spot, with whole scenes just sutured together in an attempt to fill some kind of arbitrary quota of stock horror and drama tropes. There is a complete lack of a through line here. As the film tumbled towards its bloody, gore-filled finale, I found myself wondering just how the hell we even got to this point. I was missing some sense of logical narrative progression.

Watching the film a second time only made the stone skipping nature of the narrative all the more evident. It felt that at one point, all of this was well thought out and worked as a whole, but instead of us seeing the big picture and getting all the information, we're just skipping along the surface of a narrative that made sense, stopping only long enough to jump a dozen or so pages ahead. I could fill the remaining space of this review just asking questions about the how and why of virtually every character's motivation or on-screen event and it would not be nitpicking. WE ARE STILL HERE has major, unmistakable problems. You don't need to look hard to spot them.

And honestly, the crashing down of this house of cards really bummed me out because there is so much great stuff going on in this film. I loved the look and feel of it. It's rare to find a haunted house film shot primarily in broad daylight. The bleak setting, just snow as far as the eye can see, adds this tangible feeling of isolation and hopelessness. The acting is above par, only let down by the stiff dialogue (it's amusing to watch one balding man in his 50s call another balding man in his 50s “old man”) and the sparse, moody soundtrack adds an immeasurable amount of dread to nearly every scene. The ghosts are creepy, CGI enhanced wonders to behold. Real, genuine nightmare fuel.

But then comes the splatter. Then comes the ridiculousness. Then comes the forced sentimentality and the tired possession scene, and all the good will and promise the film built up during its great first 20 minutes just goes right out the window. I wanted to love this film, but it just wouldn't stop tripping over its own two feet. This could have been better. It SHOULD have been better.

But it just isn't.