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.

Polymorph (1996)

When their boss Dr Clark (Pete Jacelone) calls his two interns Ted (James L. Edwards) and Bill (Joseph A. Daw) to some patch of woods to help with finding a freshly crashed meteorite, Bill decides to turn work into a camping weekend with his girlfriend Alice (Jennifer Huss) and Alice’s friend Donna (Ariauna Albright) as a blind date for the somewhat neurotic Ted. Little do they expect that by the point they arrive, the good doctor will already have found the meteorite, will encounter a coke-addled drug trafficker named Tarper (Sasha Graham), and, together with his security guy, will have been killed by her.

While our protagonists are wondering where their boss is, and decide to just make it a nice night in the woods when they find no trace of him beyond his car, Tarper is in the process of being taken over by a rather rude and murderous alien that came packaged with the meteorite. Also, because he had a troubling phone conversation with Tarper, her drug biz boss Carlos (Tom Hoover) is on its way to the very same patch of woods. Clearly, plot lines will collide and a shitty green proto-CG alien special effect is going to make the rounds.

As the regulars among my imaginary readers will know, I’m something of a fan of the body of work of Polymorph’s writer/director/editor/DP/producer J.R. Bookwalter, particularly those parts that are indie as all get out. Bookwalter usually had better script and a tighter grip on pacing than many of his peers in this area, so his films do tend to feature dramatic arcs that can connect with viewers who like a bit of actual structure and movement in their movie narratives, while still providing quite a bit of the eccentricity and actual weirdness of the semi-professional arm of indie horror.

Polymorph may or may not have begun as a serious “people in the woods fighting against a very cost-effective alien special effect, because we only need green digital noise” movie, but clearly, it is shot and staged very much as a comedy. Something that usually rings many alarm bells with me in productions on this budget level, because comedy is especially difficult to do in a realm where you’re lucky when half of your cast has any actual acting experience or talent, and where scripts don’t have to – sometimes can’t – hold themselves to any professional standards of polish. However, I found myself genuinely charmed by much of what was going on in the film, the silly romantic comedy bits, the sort-of Tarantino in a goofy mood parts, and the number of snarky asides that once may have begun as serious action movie one-liners. There’s quite a bit of winking at the audience here by Bookwalter and his cast, with action movie poses turned absurd (yet, this being a Bookwalter joint, edited rather well nonetheless). That kind of winking is something I tend to despise, but here, it actually adds to Polymorph’s considerable charm for me. Which is to say, many of the jokes are actually funny.

The actors do well with the different styles of humour the film uses, too, and everyone goes for the bigger and sillier interpretation of whatever they do. Frankly, I’m not convinced anyone but Albright and Hoover would actually be able to play the film straight and do a proper, convincing acting job, but this way, the whole affair gets by on sheer enthusiasm (no mumblecore non-emoting here, that’s for sure) and the wondrous magic of a handful of people making weird faces.