In short: Witches’ Night (2007)

Jim (Gil McKinney) has been left standing alone at the altar by his prospective wife, so his brother and his two best friends decide to take him out on a spontaneous drinking and camping trip that’ll even devolve into canoeing if opportunity arises because canoeing has never been the kiss of death in all horror films ever made.

Unfortunately, it turns out the night before Halloween is not a good time to be traipsing around these particular patches of wood. Witches are looking for a sacrifice to Satan, and our quartet of idiots are just the kind of people they can use for that.

I’ve seen many films that were objectively much worse than Paul Traynor’s indie horror Witches’ Night. At least, the acting here is basically decent, and while the film certainly won’t charm anyone with visual style and grace, it is shot well enough, it’s edited somewhat competently, and so on and so forth.

Yet still I enjoyed watching many a worse film much more than this one, for while Witches’ Night isn’t terrible in any way, shape or form, it is so pedestrian being terrible would at least make it somewhat more interesting. There’s little of interest happening, and the potentially interesting moments of violence and sex (I’m not even hoping for anything deeper from a film like this) are so tame, they might just as well not be in there at all for all the difference in excitement levels that would make.

However, at least the film taught me one thing: the touch of a witch leaves a nasty rash. Insert your favourite 40s mildly misogynist anti-STD slogan here, sailor.