Crew
Director – Chuck Russell, Screenplay – Greg McKay & Chuck Russell, Inspired by the Film Witchboard (1986) by Kevin Tenney, Producers – Bernie Gewissler, Greg McKay, Chuck Russell & Kade Vu, Photography – Yaron Levy, Music – Sam Ewing, Visual Effects Supervisor – Francois Trudel, Special Effects Supervisor – Louis Craig, Makeup Effects Design – Bruno Gatien, Production Design – Camille Parent. Production Company – A-Nation Media/Gala Original/Blue Rider Media.
Cast
Madison Iseman (Emily), Aaron Dominguez (Christian), Jamie Campbell Bower (Alexander Babtiste), Melanie Jarnson (Brooke), Antonia Desplat (Naga Soth), Charlie Tahan (Richie), David La Haye (Bishop Grogan), Francesco Filice (Jessie), Jamal Azemar (Jackie), Chiara Fossati, Elisha Herbert & Renee Herbert (Ashas)
Plot
Emily and her fiancé Christian are about to open a restaurant in New Orleans. Emily finds an occult board in the woods and takes it back to use as decoration for the restaurant. Christian’s ex Brooke identifies it as an occult pendulum witchboard. Unknown to them, this has been stolen from a museum. Emily discovers how to use it by dangling a finger bone that is hidden inside over the board and divining answers. However, every time she uses the board, it kills somebody close to her. Brooke takes Emily to meet the Wiccan Alexander Babtiste who reveals that the witchboard was created in France in the 1690s by Naga Soth who was persecuted as a witch. He guides Emily to free herself from the board’s influence, but this ends up with Emily transported back into Naga Soth’s body just before Naga is about to be burned at the stake and Naga Soth taking over her body in the present.
Witchboard (1986) was a modest hit of the video era. It went on to generate two sequels with Witchboard 2 (1993) and Witchboard 3: The Possession (1995). This is a remake.
The remake comes from director Chuck Russell. Russell emerged in the 1980s with the likes of A Nightmare on Elm Street III: The Dream Warriors (1987) and the remake of The Blob (1988). From there, he went on to the likes of the Jim Carrey superhero film The Mask (1994), the Arnold Schwarzenegger action film Eraser (1996), the occult flop Bless the Child (2000), The Scorpion King (2002) and I Am Wrath (2016).
There was a fad a few years ago for remaking 1970s/80s horror films with the likes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Dawn of the Dead (2004), The Amityville Horror (2005), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Halloween (2007), Piranha (2010) and Poltergeist (2015), among others. However, this seems to have largely petered out by the 2020s with the odd exception. You cannot help but wonder why people are turning to Witchboard for a remake. It was only a video release, although was popular enough that it spawned two sequels, although all of the films were very generic and nothing memorable. Not to mention that since the 2010s, we have had a bunch of mostly low-budget ‘ouija’ titled films, which has milked much of the idea of the divination board.
To be fair to Chuck Russell and co, they revamp the concept, giving us more than an Ouija board – an occult board with a human finger bone dangling over it that points to the symbols. They keep to the theme that ran through the first film of the user being possessed but elaborate this out with a backstory and even have Madison Iseman thrown back in time to the Puritan era while the witch inhabits her body in the present. There is also the aspect that came in in the sequels where the use of the witchboard causes novelty deaths to people around the user.
As with the sequels, the film centres around a series of novelty deaths. There is a sequence of events that cause Charlie Tahan to slip on the floor in the restaurant kitchen and fall onto the meat slicing machine and slice his hand off whereupon the hand is snatched by one of the ever-present cats who runs out the window with it. Somewhat lesser is a scene where Francesco Filice is trying to inject heroin into a girl at a roof party but a cat jumps, claws his eyes out and causes him to fall off the roof to be impaled on the upthrust sword of a statue below. There is an entertaining scene where the possessed Madison Iseman spikes the food at the opening of the restaurant and causes the guests to turn and attack one another.
Witchboard passes by okay, although in the end is just another slickly made horror, nothing more than that. Jamie Campbell Bower does offer an injection of charisma when he enters the show in the latter half. Here the film does make the odd blunder like its talk about ‘Ancient Wicca’ when in fact Wicca was a religion that was invented in England in 1921.
Trailer here