We meet horror heroine Abigail (Cristina Moody) some years after the loss of both her daughters in a car crash. One fateful night, a police officer visits Abigail to tell her that she might want to lock her doors extra carefully: he has a report of some escaped convicts in the area, and indeed there are no prizes for guessing that the crims will shortly show up at Abigail\u2019s place. What happens thereafter has at least the virtue of being a fairly original plot, with twists and turns as surprising as they are implausible.<\/p>\n
It would be too much of a spoiler to say exactly how the \u201cvoodoo\u201d of the title is employed, but suffice to say it blends elements drawn from actual Haitian Vodou alongside the voodoo-doll convention popularised by western pop culture. The performances, though, are the film\u2019s real weakness: much of the acting is the kind you might encounter in an escape room or ghost train experience at a theme park. The dialogue is no great shakes either, a mixture of soap opera melodrama (\u201cYou don\u2019t always have to take his side!\u201d) and crime procedural cliche (\u201cYou gave up on this job a long time ago, didn\u2019t you?\u201d). The shot choices don\u2019t help: one sequence of a woman fleeing for her life as she runs downstairs is filmed in a way that recalls Mrs Doubtfire sprinting to turn the oven off.<\/p>\n
This might seem fussy, but it\u2019s the kind of creative choice that serves to take the audience out of the story-world. And as for any cultural sensitivities around portrayal of voodoo \u2026 on the whole this enterprise is so unrelated to reality that it would feel like getting mad at a child\u2019s drawing.<\/p>\n
Bad Voodoo is on digital platforms from 16 March.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We meet horror heroine Abigail (Cristina Moody) some years after the loss of both her daughters in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":320920,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-320919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/320920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}