Cinemax was kind to me in the 90s. I had Witchboard 2 recorded on the same VHS as 976-Evil 2 and Amityville 6. Now I’ve just seen Witchboard 2 again, thanks to r/badmovies’ latest movie marathon. I suspect I’ve now seen the movie more than anyone else, including the people who made it.
This movie sucks the big one. Yeah, it’s kind of fun with the right crowd (the chatters developed a drinking game with rules such as “drink every time you see mom jeans”), but this marks the first time I’ve fallen asleep during a movie in this year’s 31 Days of Gore. I think I was out for about twenty minutes and somehow didn’t miss a thing.
So the leading female, who we’ll call Dullsville, moves into a new apartment and decides she’s going to be a hotshot painter. Dullsville’s landlady (Laraine Newman from SNL) is crazy and believes it’s still 1969 for no other reason than the filmmakers thought it was funny. (Nothing in this movie is funny and it’s painful whenever it tries.) The landlady’s husband is an old pervert, Dullsville’s previous love interest is an abusive cop, and her new love interest is an snarky photographer who helps her investigate the strange happenings that occur after the previous tenant’s Ouija board is found in a closet.
Then nothing interesting at all happens for what feels like an eternity.
Here’s a movie which tries to make use of camera techniques Sam Raimi pioneered in Evil Dead, but the shots are used nonsensically. The camera pushes through a moving car and down a chimney and sometimes flies all over the damn place, but there’s rarely a reason for it. It’s kind of like the filmmakers are mimicking things they’ve seen in better movies, but didn’t understand why they were there in the first place.
Calling the characters one-dimensional would be giving them too much praise. As for redeeming qualities? There are none. The most exciting thing in the movie was given away by the box art and it turns out it was a dream anyway. How lame.
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