{"id":285,"date":"2008-07-29T13:35:05","date_gmt":"2008-07-29T13:35:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/europeanfilmreview.co.uk\/blog\/?p=285"},"modified":"2008-07-29T13:35:33","modified_gmt":"2008-07-29T13:35:33","slug":"london-voodoo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/reviews\/london-voodoo\/","title":{"rendered":"London Voodoo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"London<\/a><\/p>\n

Robert Pratten’s London Voodoo <\/strong>is a pretty decent 2004 horror flick that plays not entirely unlike an episode of the old Hammer House of Horror <\/strong>TV series, or possibly an extended version of one of the stories that used to appear in the numerous anthologies made by Amicus et al in the early 70s.<\/p>\n

The plot follows an American couple, Lincoln and Sarah Mathers (Doug Cockle and Sara Stewart), who move to London with their young daughter when he’s promoted into a high-powered job in the City. Unfortunately, their relationship is already under strain due to his workoholic tendencies, and this isn’t helped when he’s assigned the management of an important project; bidding for the takeover of a Swedish company who do something highly profitable (don’t ask me what, I didn’t understand it!) In order to pacify his wife, he hires a nanny, Kelly (Vonda Barnes), who seems to spend most of her time trying to seduce him and therefore doesn’t exactly help matters.<\/p>\n

Sarah, however, has her own problems. While excavating the basement, a pair of builders have uncovered a voodoo grave, and the spirit of the dead woman buried there – an former warrior from who moved to the UK from Benin in the early 1900s – has possessed her. This causes her to start dressing like an 80s pop video extra, appearing sinsterly in doorways, cackling madly and acting in a generally unladylike manner. Completely bemused by everything that’s going on, Lincoln turns to a group of local voodoo afficionados to help him out.<\/p>\n

This is all decently enough done, in a low-budget kind of way. The plot has a couple of pointless elements (Kelly’s attempts to poison Sarah and drive her mad, which seem entirely unnecessary) and some shakey dialogue, but none of it is too grating. The cinematography does look a tad flat at times, but is effective elsewhere, while Pratten’s direction is perfectly adequate and shows some promise (it will be interesting to see what he does with his second film, Mindflesh<\/strong>, which is due for release any day now). It’s certainly one of the better recent horror films, and it has a curiously old-fashioned feel – there’s very little sex or violence, hardly any special FX – which actually makes it all the more enjoyable.<\/p>\n

Anglo-American actress Sara Stewart certainly suffers for her art, having to dress up in all sorts of bizarre costumes, and seems happier when the pace becomes a little frenzied (although this is partly down to the writing as well). The splendidly named Doug Cockle does a decent job of looking completely befuddled, and the scenes where he’s having to do a high powered presentation while his life’s disintigrating around him are a hoot. Also in the cast, oddly, are a couple of high-profile Swedish actors, Michel Nyquist and Sven-Bertil Taube, who top-billed in the 1971 B-Movie Puppet on a Chain<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Pratten’s London Voodoo is a pretty decent 2004 horror flick that plays not entirely unlike an episode of the old Hammer House of Horror TV series<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[284,282,283,285],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewildeye.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}