Review #302: Witchouse II: Blood Coven (2000)
October 2024 Horror Origins Review #19- Witchouse II: Blood Coven (2000)
Similar to Camp Blood, about twelve or thirteen years ago we discovered that this movie we loved and watched a hundred times (Witchouse) had not one, but two sequels! So we immediately ordered a copy of the trilogy and... proceeded to watch each sequel one time and never again. This movie is as forgettable now as it was then, and I can confidently say I won't be revisiting it again anytime soon.
Witchouse II: Blood Coven takes place in a small town in New England where a spooky abandoned mansion is set to be demolished so a shopping mall can be built, but the demolition crew somehow noticed that the land had four 200-year-old coffins buried on it. So they called in a college research team to analyze the bodies so they can determine who these graves were for- and (after a lot of back-and-forth) it turns out they were a group of evil witches led by Lilith LeFey. But while doing their investigation, the professor in charge of the project accidentally cuts herself and gets some of Lilith's bone dust in her wound, so she turns into Lilith herself and uses witch DNA to resurrect her fellow witches so they can open up a portal to the witch dimension or something. But the sheriff in town is secretly (for some reason) also the last surviving member of a long line of witch hunters so he helps the last two researchers fight off the witches and make the ultimate sacrifice to stop evil.
First things first: this movie seems to have been marketed as a sequel to Witchouse, but the two have no connection whatsoever. Lilith LeFey (the antagonist of the previous movie) is in this one, played by the same actress- but her backstory in this entry is completely different than in Witchouse, so the two stories are contradictory. (Speaking of Lilith, it's very weird how this plays out. The actress that played her before, Ariauna Albright, plays the college professor, which makes it easy to then have her transform into Lilith since it's the same actress. But the film uses Ariauna's identity as an early-movie "reveal" or "twist", by having a scene where the college Dean is talking to her and the camera keeps sweeping around but not showing her face. Then, at the end of the scene, it very prominently shows her face for the first time, as if to say, "Whoa, guess what! Lilith is here, but she's a college professor! I bet you weren't expecting that!") So clearly they intended for viewers to have seen the previous movie, but then they went and told a story that necessitates the previous one not have happened. [Edit from Gabe after finishing this review: according to the IMDB trivia, Ariauna Albright ALSO plays the girl who dies in the opening scene, though she is credited under a pseudonym. So I honestly don't know if the "reveal" of her as the professor is meant to be "Whoa, Lilith is here!" or "Whoa, that girl you just saw die is alive as the professor!" Both are equally irrelevant to the plot.]
Second: This movie was VERY clearly meant to piggyback off the recent success of the Blair Witch Project. The opening scene is ~5 minutes or so of a shakey found-footage segment of two teens going into the woods and getting killed, that is otherwise unconnected to the film and has no bearing on it at all. (While watching I had been assuming their deaths were the catalyst for the town finding the witches' graves- but no, upon a re-watch of the opening just now, the college dean basically just says, "These teens died on that property. Anyway, while some people were preparing the property for demolition they found these four graves...") While the movie as a whole is not found-footage, there are numerous found-footage segments, but they're almost all incredibly poorly-done, with the shots clearly having been edited from multiple takes (with multiple angles for each scene despite the characters only having one camera, as well as timecode that moves uniformly between cuts and a visible battery gauge that fluctuates wildly within a given scene). There's also a scene of the protagonists interviewing townsfolk about local legends (exactly like the interviews in Blair Witch) but that scene was pretty entertaining and provided a bit of levity in this otherwise dull film.
I really didn't care for the characters (especially the male lead, who says every single line with the same head-bob and sarcastic smile) or the setting. I could be interested in a movie about a scientific research team living in a haunted house and encountering spooky phenomena, but there's other movies for that. This film doesn't actively bother or annoy me like a lot of other bad entries I've seen, but this one just doesn't have anything good going for it. It's a lazy follow-up that's trying to be a lazy cash-in at the same time. I don't remember much about the third Witchouse but after this one I'm not excited for tomorrow's viewing.
Overall Rating: 4/10 iMac Withdrawals
Nostalgic Rating: 3/10 Jugs of Bone-Burning Acid
Priorities, Priorities: According to the IMDB Trivia, director J.R. Bookwalter said "Among the changes for this sequel, we really sexed up Lilith, including giving her much bigger breasts." Good to see that they're putting the important things first, right?
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