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This week's last-minute VOD selection (this is just gonna be a thing now) is a bit of a Halloween leftover. This is a bit like taking 'Serpent and the Rainbow', 'Misery', 'Get Out' and maybe a touch of 'The Hills Have Eyes' and throwing it all into a blender. Coming to us from director Mark Tonderai, we probably best recognize his film work from the long-forgotten Jennifer Lawrence thriller, 'The House at the End of the Street'. He otherwise dabbles in a lot of TV, and it sort of shows with his quality of film that he may be better off. These movies aren't terrible, but if they were AMC originals, you wouldn't be surprised.

The film opens up with a disturbing black screen, accompanied by the sound of the beating of a child, presumably with a belt. This turns out to be our lead, ​Marquis Woods (Omari Hardwick) as a kid, and his recently deceased father (Ri-Karlo Handy). In present day, Marquis receives word of his father's death, and his wife, Veora (Lorraine Burroughs) insists that they go to the funeral in rural Appalachia. Along with their two children, Samsara and Tyden (Hannah Gonera and Kalifa Burton, respectively), they begin to fly out using Marquis' private plane.

The family does have to land to fuel up, but during this we get our harbinger scene where a couple of creepy dudes let the audience know that this family is headed towards danger. Sure enough, eventually the plane is caught in a terrible storm, crashes, and Marquis awakens all alone in a strange room. Here, Ms. Eloise (Loretta Devine) and her husband, Earl (John Beasley) have him trapped, keeping him from the rest of his family. As Marquis attempts several escapes while nearly getting caught, he slowly unravels a disturbing web of dark voodoo magic, and must attempt to find and rescue his family before they become part of a ritual during next blood moon.

Right off the bat, I'm gonna go ahead and say that if you're an animal lover, you're probably gonna want to avoid this movie. They kill plenty of animals here, and use their parts for the magic involved in the plot. So it's not really unnecessarily crowbarred in, but it might show you more than you wish to see without being up close and personal about it - that's saved for other scenes involving a spike in a foot, which is also very cringe-worthy. So it's not for those who don't like torture porn either. Between those two elements alone, I'm surprised I managed to sit through it. But to the film's credit, it was disturbing even without the gory stuff, and I found it fairly reminiscent of 'The Serpent and the Rainbow' in some respects.

This is a fairly different twist on the typical "held-captive" movie, using black magic and not really holding back with it. But before you watch it and simply say "Voodoo is bad" after seeing all of this horror, please do your homework on it. More than anything, the horror from this comes from how it's used and who is using it. It's the difference between handing a machete to Jason Voorhees or Martha Stewart. All in all, I didn't mind the film, but it's still something I wouldn't recommend as anything more than a cheap rental. It does its job at being disturbing and creepy, and the villain performances are spot on, especially by Loretta Devine. But the fact of the matter is, it's just a different take on a very familiar formula, and it involves dissecting animals and looking at Voodoo as "evil". One might get more than me from it, but it's a once-only watch for this guy.

2/5

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