H.P. LOVECRAFT'S WITCH HOUSE (2021)

Studio:     Jinga Films Ltd.
Director:    Bobby Easley
Writer:     Ken Wallace, Bobby Easley
Producer:  Bobby Easley, Ken Wallace, James Brenton
Stars:     Michelle Morris, Julie Anne Prescott, Erin Trimble, Andie Noir, John Johnson, Joe Padgett, Solon Tsangaras

Review Score:

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Summary:

A troubled woman rents a mysterious room where she becomes haunted by cosmic visions controlled by an ancient witch.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

To escape her abusive ex Drew and to focus on her research as a Miskatonic University student, Alice Gilman rents an attic room in the reportedly haunted Hannah House. Alice meets her odd landlady Etta, Etta’s normal niece Tommi, and Etta’s strange brother Joe, an alcoholic obsessed with religion. Meanwhile, a string of child abductions plagues the surrounding community.

Alice finds an altar cloth adorned with occult symbols hidden under an attic floorboard. As part of her research into how geometrical shapes in architecture could be used to open otherworldly portals, Alice discovers the item is the “Altar Cloth of Enoch,” which is used in transcendental gateway magic.

While taking her on a tour of the house, Tommi shows Alice a portrait of Keziah Mason, a servant girl who once lived there. Tommi also shows Alice where Etta hides historical paperwork Alice can use in her studies.

After drinking wine together, Alice and Tommi end up having sex. Through a dreamy haze, Alice sees strange visions of a black magic blood ritual.

Alice learns that Hannah House has a history of being linked to ritual murders as well as missing children believed to be used as sacrifices. Alice draws an occult symbol on her attic floor as she becomes consumed by the house’s history and its relationship to her research into inter-dimensional gateways. Alice continues suffering from haunting visions of Keziah Mason and babies being sacrificed in a forest.

Alice goes into a sudden trance while giving a presentation in class. When Alice tells her that she believes a spiritual force is influencing her through dreamy visions, Alice’s concerned friend Kelly takes Alice to see Professor Grey, an expert on Hannah House’s history. Grey reveals that Keziah Mason was a witch burned at the stake for luring kids to be killed in the attic, and as the wife of the devil, she is thought to also be somehow responsible for the current kidnappings.

Kelly drops off Alice back at the house. After she is alone, a demonic presence kills Kelly in her car.

Alice continues suffering from frightening visions. After waking her from another trance, Tommi tells Alice she thinks her research successfully opened a portal.

A doctor tells Alice she is pregnant, which should be impossible because she is infertile. Upon returning home, Alice is attacked by her abusive ex Drew. Etta’s crazed brother Joe saves Alice by beating Drew to death with a baseball bat. Joe cryptically claims, “He isn’t the only one I’ve killed for you.” Alice realizes Joe has been kidnapping the local children for use in ritual sacrifices. Joe blames Alice for awakening Keziah, who forces him to commit his crimes for her.

Tommi breaks ranks with her family’s secret coven by telling Alice that Keziah is using her as a vessel to birth the antichrist. Tommi gives Alice a dagger capable of killing Keziah since it is the source of her powers. Etta later kills Tommi for betraying their coven and feeds Tommi’s heart to her familiar, a humanoid rat named Brown Jenkin. Meanwhile, Joe becomes driven to cut off his own head with a straight razor.

Nightmarish visions plague Alice as she performs an invocation to open a dream doorway. Alice ultimately kills Etta with the dagger following an altercation with another cultist. Alice then runs outside where she is accosted by Kelly. Recognizing that the witch stole her friend’s appearance, Alice stabs Keziah/Kelly. The dreamy visions dissipate as Keziah dies.

Alice wakes on a couch next to Kelly to discover everything that happened was apparently a nightmare. However, both women are shocked to see that Alice is now inexplicably pregnant.

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Review:

Oops, my bad. I had no business watching “H.P. Lovecraft’s Witch House,” let alone reviewing it. I’m not sure anyone does. It’s one of those ultra lo-fi indies shot in a backyard or a basement, the kind of homemade horror I swore off a long time ago because I hate dumping all over forgettable fly-by-night flicks almost as much as I hate sitting through them. But I did sit through it, and I need new content, so I’m going to bear down and do this against my better judgment anyway.

Immediately after its opening credits animation, which is the best thing about the movie I kid you not, “H.P. Lovecraft’s Witch House” warns you to turn it off and find a better-presented film to watch instead. Poorly sourced audio bounces off of walls. The camera crams itself to within two inches of anything and anyone it shoots, jittering from being handheld not for aesthetic purposes, but because it looks like a tripod was just too much trouble. Actors you’ve never seen before and never will again, over half of whom predictably don’t have IMDb headshots, awkwardly recite monotone lines with the stiffness of a million wooden planks. Characters simply walk out of frame when their scenes are over because editing has no sense of timing, only a baseline desire to begin and end exactly on a given action. A makeup artist gets a credit, yet some people don’t seem to be wearing makeup at all; if they are, they appear to have applied it themselves. Daytime shots are overexposed. Exterior shots only use available light. To sum it up in a single sentence, “H.P. Lovecraft’s Witch House” is drenched face to feet in efforts that I’m sure are well intentioned, yet are undeniably amateur nonetheless.

The plot combines a hodgepodge of pieces yanked from Lovecraft’s original story plus some scatterbrained sequences where a haunted woman suffers strange visions that are muddled montages of snarling faces bathed in green light. There’s also a side story of sorts involving children kidnapped in a couple of comically staged scenes like one woman who completely abandons her stroller in a park so she can take a five-second phone call. Everything amounts to a whole lot of nonsense for something that looks exactly like an average digital drop from Wild Eye Releasing even though, incredibly, “H.P. Lovecraft’s Witch House” wasn’t actually distributed by Wild Eye Releasing.

I’m not really sure what else there is to say. I could stop right now except, like I said, I have space to fill. So until I reach my minimum word count, I’m going to fling more useless noise at you the same way this movie does.

Here’s something weird. At the time of this writing, the Amazon page for “H.P. Lovecraft’s Witch House” has 38 user reviews dated between 2016 and 2019 even though the movie debuted in 2021 and released on DVD and VOD in 2022. Looks like Amazon mistakenly folded in reviews for an anime that I assume probably has “Witch House” in its title. The reviews are so vague that you have to read several of them to piece together what happened since phrases like “It’s bizarre, creative and taboo” and “the graphics are wild” sound like they could be meant for this film, although that praise would only have come from the mother of someone who worked on the movie.

Let’s see, not even at 600 words yet. Hmm. Oh, here’s my last note. I made the mistake of pausing during a requisite research montage and found gibberish text apparently pulled from a food critic’s column sitting underneath a newspaper headline about a grisly murder.

Ugh, still 50-ish words left to go. Not enough to bring up Lovecraft having become a problematic figure in our post-woke world, and too many to let me unshackle this burdensome ball and chain even one minute early. I swear, disposable DTV’ers like “H.P. Lovecraft’s Witch House” make this job a real chore sometimes, and this is definitely one of those times.

Review Score: 20

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