Studio:   The Avenue
Director: Chuck Russell
Writer:   Chuck Russell, Greg McKay
Producer: Chuck Russell, Kade Vu, Greg McKay, Bernie Gewissler
Stars:    Madison Iseman, Aaron Dominguez, Melanie Jarnson, Charlie Tahan, Antonia Desplat, Jamie Campbell Bower, David La Haye, Elisha Herbert, Renee Herbert

Review Score:

Summary:

Over 300 years after her apparent death, a witch is reawakened by a cursed pendulum board in present day New Orleans.

Synopsis:

In France’s Lorraine Province in 1693 A.D., Bishop Grogan disfigures the face of suspected witch Naga Soth before banishing her from their village for practicing dark magic. Pelted by stones from angry villagers on her flight into a nearby forest, Naga Soth curses the mob by vowing that the hands that defiled her will be torn from their bodies.

Sometime later, Naga Soth uses the supernatural power of a cursed pendulum board whose accompanying pendant is made from one of her fingerbones to cause villagers to go mad and kill each other. After capturing Bishop Grogan, Naga Soth and her coven of witches prepare to ritualistically kill him using the board in a forest clearing whose trees are adorned by hands severed from villagers. Before Grogan can be killed, however, men arrive to attack the coven and capture Naga Soth, whose blood spatters on the pendulum board.

In the present day, Booker and Lebarge, two thieves secretly working for Dr. Alexander Baptiste, a professor of wiccan studies, break into the New Orleans Museum of Natural History to steal the pendulum board from its display case. An altercation between the two thieves results in Booker being beaten to the ground after firing two bullets into Lebarge. Despite his gunshot wounds, Lebarge kills two police officers responding to the robbery and escapes with the board.

While picking mushrooms with her fiancé Christian and other chefs preparing to open Christian’s new restaurant, a stray cat later learned to be Naga Soth’s familiar leads Emily, an orphan and recovering drug addict, to the pendulum board, which was dropped on the forest floor. Emily takes the board home, although she does not notice Lebarge’s dead body lying nearby.

Booker meets with Dr. Alexander Baptiste to discuss Lebarge and the missing pendulum board. Alexander has three white witch servants, all named Asha, slit Booker’s throat so his blood can be used in a ritual to divine the board’s location.

To celebrate the upcoming opening of his Creole Kings Café, Christian and Emily host a party for their friends. Christian and Emily are both uncomfortable to learn that Christian’s sous chef Richie invited Christian’s archaeologist ex-girlfriend Brooke, who is still attracted to Christian, to the party.

Emily shows the pendulum board to Brooke, who identifies it as a wiccan item for contacting supernatural spirits. Emily tries using the board with her cross pendant, but the only thing that happens is brief panic among partygoers when a bird on fire suddenly flies out of the chimney.

Home alone the next day, Emily finds the fingerbone pendant hidden inside the board. She also watches a newscast featuring Dr. Alexander Baptiste that identifies the board as having been stolen in a museum robbery where two cops died.

Emily uses the board to locate her missing engagement ring. At the same time, a series of peculiar events leads to Richie severing his hand on an industrial slicer in the restaurant. The stray cat Emily saw in the forest runs away with Richie’s hand. Richie soon dies from blood loss.

At Richie’s funeral, Emily has an encounter with her former drug dealer Jesse. Fearing a possible relapse, Christian angrily warns Jesse to stay away from Emily.

Emily takes in the stray cat, which she names Mr. Lucky. Concerned about Emily’s ongoing obsession with the pendulum board, Christian does online research that connects the board to a bizarre death as well as the museum robbery. Christian later tells Emily they should return the board, but Emily refuses out of fear for the police looking into her drug arrest record.

While Emily experiences several instances of paranormal activity that show her pivotal moments from Naga Soth’s past, Brooke takes Christian to see her colleague Dr. Alexander Baptiste under the pretense of helping Emily by learning more about the mysterious board. During an unusual celebration of the Summer Solstice, Alexander tells Christian the history behind Naga Soth cursing the board. Christian also reveals that his great-great-grandfather was Naga Soth’s tormenter, Bishop Grogan.

In a state of possession, Emily seduces Christian when he returns home. Confused by her bizarre behavior, Christian wonders aloud if Emily obtained drugs from Jesse. Emily tells Christian that the board told her Jesse will never bother them again. While the two of them have sex, the stray cat causes Jesse to fall off a roof elsewhere. Following Jesse’s gruesome death, Emily snaps out of her trance, but not before Christian briefly sees her transform into a vision of Naga Soth.

Anxious to address her odd behavior, Christian introduces Emily to Alexander. Claiming he can return her to her true self, Christian hypnotizes Emily while using the pendulum board. However, Christian’s ritual actually causes Emily and Naga Soth to switch bodies and time periods. Naga Soth possesses Emily while Emily’s spirit is put into Naga Soth’s body when she is a prisoner of Bishop Grogan’s being prepared to burn at the stake.

Possessed by Naga Soth, Emily returns to the forest to pick mushrooms growing out of Lebarge’s corpse. Emily brings the mushrooms back to Christian’s restaurant where they are served to guests at his grand opening banquet. Mirroring the scene from the past when villagers were driven to kill each other, restaurant guests begin hallucinating and turning violent. Chaos ensues as patrons start murdering each other as well as several chefs. Alexander and Emily leave together.

Christian kills food critic William Douchet in self-defense just as cops arrive at the restaurant. Officers attempt to arrest Christian, but he flees outside where Brooke has him jump in her vehicle. Brooke tells Christian she will take him to Emily, but she instead hands him over to henchmen at Alexander’s estate and reveals she is becoming wiccan under Alexander’s guidance.

Christian recovers from unconsciousness to find himself restrained in Alexander’s study. Alexander reveals Naga Soth was reborn in Emily’s body as part of his plan to exploit Bishop Grogan’s bloodline and become the witch’s master so he can gain immortality like her. Alexander also reveals that Emily’s real mother was a witch who died trying to summon Naga Soth using the board, which was the bizarre death Christian previously read about online as well as the event that made Emily an orphan.

Still possessed by Naga Soth, Emily enters the room dressed as the witch and bearing her distinct facial scars. Various confrontations occur until Emily envisions Alexander as his ancestor Bishop Grogan. This causes Emily to become enraged and attack the Asha triplets. Christian uses the opportunity to throw the pendulum board into a fireplace.

The board’s burning causes Emily and Naga Soth’s consciousnesses to return to their proper bodies and time periods. Naga Soth finds herself being burned at the stake in 1693 while Bishop Grogan oversees her execution. When Naga Soth doesn’t die, Grogan approaches to behead her with a sword. Naga Soth pulls Grogan into the fire to burn alongside her.

Alexander fires several bullets into Christian. When Alexander goes to the fireplace to retrieve the board, Christian manages to throw an alcohol bottle that sets the estate on fire. Recovering in her own body, Emily grabs a gun and shoots Alexander in his head, although he is later seen opening his eyes while being zipped into a body bag. Before dying, Christian gives Emily back her cross pendant.

Brooke and Emily later sell the pendulum board to an archbishop at Vatican City in Rome in exchange for diamonds. After the two women leave, the archbishop begins using the board. Naga Soth appears behind the archbishop just before he screams.

Review:

End credits for “Witchboard” specify that this 2024 incarnation was “inspired by” writer/director Kevin Tenney’s screenplay for the original 1986 film. “Inspired by” is indeed the correct phrasing, as this version isn’t really a remake in the traditional sense. In fact, it doesn’t even include a Ouija board, the centerpiece item that made the first film and its Hasbro-owned prop somewhat famous. This “Witchboard” instead uses a pendulum board, a large wooden disc used in tandem with a swaying pendant, to drive its story, which is far more focused on the “witch” than it is on the “board” this time around.

During a prologue set in 1693 France, a witch named Naga Soth tries to exact vengeance on the bishop who exiled her from their village by having her coven kill him with the cursed pendulum board. Her ritual gets cut short, however, when men come to the bishop’s rescue by setting fire to the women and capturing Naga Soth, although not before she bleeds all over the board.

Mingling blood with an occult artifact is always an ominous portent of awful events on their way in horror movies, but in this case, it takes over 300 years to come about in the present day. Emily, an orphan and a recovering drug addict, the only two details we know about her and thus two background bits that will definitely both be in play later, picks mushrooms in a forest with her fiancé Christian, a chef preparing to open a creole restaurant in New Orleans. Led by a strange stray cat, Emily ventures into the trees and finds the pendulum board lying on the ground.

It’s a finding so fortuitous, you’d think Emily might search nearby to see if additional valuables might have been dropped. Then again, if she took two seconds to look on the other side of the bush right next to her, she’d find the dead body of the thief who stole the board from a museum, and “Witchboard” can’t have her clued into the danger ahead this early, can it?

You might also think that when a bird on fire flies out of the chimney in front of panicking partygoers the first time she uses the board, Emily might reconsider whether it was wise to bring the thing home. After that though, she can’t stop using the board, even when she just happens to be fiddling with it in front of a TV whose perfectly timed newscast identifies the rare item as recently stolen in a robbery. Christian thinks they should do the right thing by turning it over to the police, but Emily insists they “don’t even know if it’s the same board.” Seems unlikely that two separate, 300-year-old pendulum boards could have surfaced at the same time in the same city, but that’s how desperate Emily is to keep the board in her clutches. Plus, she’s afraid if they involve the cops, they’ll find “the drug bust on her record” and… arrest her again or something? “Witchboard” would rather viewers ignore all questions and simply accept the thin motivations behind baffling actions.

In addition to nightmares and paranormal activity that show Emily scenes from Naga Soth’s tormented past, the situation grows stranger when Dr. Alexander Baptiste (or Babtiste depending upon if you prefer the news chyron or the end credits’ spelling), a university professor of wiccan studies played by an actor who loves to stare out of upturned eyes while reciting dialogue like he’s a “Jurassic World” bad guy, becomes involved. Alexander has a not-so-surprising connection to Naga Soth’s past, and his involvement with Christian’s archaeologist ex-girlfriend Brooke further hints at him having a sinister plan in store. Naturally, he does, and his plot to put his own hands on the mystical pendulum board will help reawaken Naga Soth, and connect her curse across centuries with Emily and Christian mixed up in the middle.

Everything about “Witchboard” 2024 can be described as “average,” with “below” sometimes fitting in front of that word arguably more often than “above” applies. Generic plot beats are of the plug-and-play variety that average movies usually recycle. For instance, online research fills in exposition early on followed by a bigger info dump when the villain explains the scheme to his captives. The climax combines two tropes with an accidental fire burning down a building and then survivors recovering in an ambulance afterward. There’s even a jump scare involving a cat, but considering director Chuck Russell made his name in the ‘80s, maybe he hasn’t received the memo about what passes as passe in the genre nowadays.

“Witchboard” concludes on an epilogue that’s ridiculous not for its creative risks, but because it’s so out of whack for the remaining characters, it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Yet that’s part of the movie’s peculiar style. A little dopey, a lot ambitious, it’s a bit like vintage Charles Band tried to make a DTV Blumhouse movie with theatrical A24 money. I’m not sure if that’s a kooky kind of inadvertent endorsement, an outright insult, or some combination of both. No matter what, “Witchboard” has a vein of weirdness that ensures it at least isn’t totally bland, although it’s still indisputably silly.

Review Score: 50