If you grew up in the age of neighborhood video stores and got your movie education from the horror section, then odds are that you watched Witchboard, the Ouija board chiller starring Tawny Kitaen (AKA the model writhing on Whitesnake’s car). It wasn’t great, but it was a perfect pizza-and-beer movie night flick, and everyone was surprised because Kitaen was the best actor in it.
What does the new Witchboard have to do with the Z-movie classic? Beyond the title and the final shot, pretty much nothing. Well, to be fair, both of them center on a woman who is slowly being possessed by an evil spirit that accessed this plane through a spooky board, but very little else beyond that vaguest of outlines. Rather than being psychically assaulted by a Satanic axe murderer, Emily (Iseman, Jumanji: The Next Level) becomes the vessel of Naga Soth (Desplat), a 17th-century witch who is trying to rejoin the living in modern New Orleans. Why New Orleans (other than Louisiana’s production incentives)? Because it allows this Witchboard to add a level of sultry sexiness and hoodoo debauchery provided by Alexander Babtiste (Bower, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street), a cut-rate Anton LaVey figure who is obviously the villain of the piece even when he’s claiming to help Emily.
Oh, there is one other thing that this Witchboard has in common with the original. Every time Emily uses the titular scrying tool to foresee the future and unwittingly bind herself closer to Soth, someone near her dies in an impressively gruesome and ghoulish fashion. Even better, several of these deaths take place in the French Quarter restaurant of her boyfriend, Christian (Dominguez), allowing for some devilish kitchen-based, Final Destination-esque foreshadowing that pays off in bloody practical effects.
In those moments, the new Witchboard surpasses the original, and that’s all down to director Chuck Russell. Before he went big studio legit with Jim Carrey’s Looney Tunes antics in The Mask, he was a crown prince of gory VHS fun, directing one of the era’s greatest horror remakes (The Blob) and the second-best Nightmare on Elm Street movie (yes, that would be Dream Warriors). This new, silly Witchboard in the Bayou may have better performances than the leaden original – not hard – but it’s definitely got more and better kills. Kevin Tenney, who created the original film, tried to depend on a sense of supernatural dread that he just couldn’t carry off. Russell still has his old B-movie instincts, and when the chaos really breaks out he channels those cheesy Eighties thrills perfectly.
The new Witchboard undoubtedly trips over itself with its needlessly complicated plotting, and a well-intentioned but clumsy subplot about the misogyny of the French Witch Trials. The geographic shift from California chills to Cajun creepiness means swapping out Kathleen Wilhoite’s wonderfully ridiculous New Age psychic from the original for a generic Wiccan witch (Jarnson), and that’s a definite downgrade. Moreover, this new version overstays its welcome with a clunky coda that takes the sequel tease of the original and turns that promise into a bit of a threat. However, it’s still fun. Tenney built a mini-franchise through two increasingly bad sequels by concentrating on the Ouija board rather than any characters. If Russell takes that path, trims down the mythology and keeps up the body count, maybe it’s time for this franchise to truly return. If that happens, break out the pizza and beer.
