Review #303: Witchouse 3: Demon Fire (2001)

October 2024 Horror Origins Review #20- Witchouse 3: Demon Fire (2001)

Watch it here on Amazon Freevee! (You'll need an Amazon account but the movie is free to watch with ads.)

As with Witchouse II: Blood Coven, I don't remember much about my first viewing of this movie, except I vaguely recalled the ending twist. (I don't think this is a great movie but the twist is by far the best part of it, so I'm going to try not to spoil it.) By and large this one didn't leave much of an impact on me and I'm pretty sure I know why.

Witchouse 3: Demon Fire is about three friends- Annie, Stevie, and Rose- who reunite after a long time apart, when Annie shows up after apparently having been physically abused by her live-in boyfriend. Stevie has an enthusiasm for both video production and witchcraft, so while filming a documentary about witches she convinces the other two to join her in a ritual to communicate with a witch named Lilith. Despite Stevie later admitting that she made it all up, the ritual seems to have worked- and the three friends start getting haunted by this witch's spirit and punished for meddling in things they shouldn't have.

I do have some good things to say about this movie but I need to start off with the bad: it looks terrible. What happened between Witchouse II and 3 that made one look like a (admittedly very low-budget) movie and the other look like a school project? All of the Witchouse movies have been shot on video, but the previous two at least look to have been on a higher-quality video, and/or are given a soft lighting and color grading to make them resemble the warmth and smoothness of film. Witchouse 3, however, looks like it was shot on the same kind of camera as Camp Blood or Carnage: The Legend of Quiltface, and it immediately makes the movie feel like a less-than-professional production. 

But it's more than just the quality of the recording- Witchouse 1 and II had sets and locations. Witchouse 3 is shot entirely in somebody's normal house, on a beach outside that house, and in a car driving through that neighborhood. Did they lose 90% of their budget or something? Or was this some sort of intentional change in style? I talked about how Witchouse 1 is this cozy, silly delight- and while Witchouse II lacked most of that at least it felt like the same people made it. This one honestly feels like it was made over a weekend by someone who borrowed a camera. (Don't get me wrong, I know more went into it than that- this one is considerably better quality than Camp Blood or Quiltface, I don't mean to sound like I don't know what kind of work goes into even a bad video production- but the drop in quality between these last two movies is distinct and impossible to ignore.)

Anyway, with that addressed I want to say that although I'm not really crazy about this film as a whole I think the second half of it is by far the best part. I am absolutely a sucker for a movie where you later find out that you've been following an unreliable narrator- there's some parts of the twist that kind of make less and less sense the more you think about it (Why didn't Burke just call and ask to talk to Stevie or Rose? Why did he tackle Stevie on the beach?) but the movie does a very good job of establishing a believable story at the beginning, and leaving just enough breadcrumbs by the time you get to the reveal that you feel like you could have figured it out yourself if only you had worked a little harder at it.

As much as I think the movie looks cheap, I respect the fact that it has such a small cast (five principle cast members, two of which are only on screen for a couple minutes total) and is operating on a much smaller scope than the previous two. There's something to be said about creating a full story with so small of a cast and with so few locations (even if it's jarring when comparing it to the other two movies in the series).

All in all I liked this one more than the previous movie, but not nearly as much as the first. 

Overall Rating: 5/10 Beach Assailants

Nostalgic Rating: 3/10 Knee-Height Bloody Warnings

A Better Replacement: Apparently, director J.R. Bookwalter wasn't originally planning on making a third Witchouse after being so satisfied with the second. But he found out that Full Moon pictures was about to purchase the rights to a low-budget rip-off of The Craft and just retitle it Witchouse 3, and he insisted he could make an entirely new movie for the same price. So, that's how we got what we got.