In short: Witchouse II: Blood Coven (2000)

After four dead bodies have been found on the grounds of an old creepy house that’s making place for a one of those new-fangled shopping malls, a forensic anthropologist professor (I assume) played by J.R. Bookwalter alum Ariauna Albright and her students are called in to find out whatever they can about the remains. The town where all of this is happening is situated right in Romania, Massachusetts (or is it the other way round?) and apparently well-known for its witch-hunting past, so it will come as a surprise to anyone not having read the film’s title that the Prof and her students are soon bedevilled by supernatural nonsense and possession. Perhaps Andrew Prine, Witch Hunter will be able to help out?

One of the ironies of director J.R. Bookwalter’s career is his hitting of the professional movie-making circuit via Full Moon pictures (which sounds small-scale, but actually meant ten times the budget he had to work with before) actually resulted in less entertaining films than the ones he made on his own dime. This sequel to the David DeCoteau snoozer is a case in point, suffering from a script (by Douglas Snauffer, who actually worked with Bookwalter on his indie films, though not on the scripts) that never seems to know when to end scenes. There’s a particularly egregious part with interviews of the local populace clearly meant to parodically cash in on the Blair Witch style of POV horror that manages to be unfunny as well as endless that puts the final nail in the coffin of the movie’s pacing.

We also have the major problem of a plot that’s good for half a movie (even of a runtime under eighty minutes) at best that has to be dragged out to Full Moon full length by any means necessary. Often Bookwalter attempts to fill the empty spaces where a movie is supposed to be with quips in the style of most of his indie movies, but the pacing of delivery and timing is off there, too.

From time to time, there are moments that still suggest that Bookwalter is a technically more accomplished filmmaker than your typical Full Moon hack of the company’s phase when all the actually capable filmmakers stopped working there, so some of the final act bad special effects monster fighting becomes genuinely entertaining – and who wouldn’t approve of John Prine, Witch Hunter ? – and some of the performances manage to be entertainingly over the top instead of just being bad, but that’s not really enough to save the film as a whole.