Spell (film): bizarre and simply bad

I like the idea behind supernatural horror films and can say that they are one of my favorite genres. This is especially true of the Japanese or Koreans get involved but that was not the case here. This is a 2020 film that I had never heard of until it was featured on my Netflix homepage a few days ago. The trailer looked solid and I gave it a go. By about 30 minutes in I was skipping large portions of it out of boredom. By the end of it I solidly gave it a thumbs down and won't recommend it to anyone outside of a few scenes that were pretty gruesome and neat.

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Just a bit of info: "In select theaters" appears to mean that the producers didn't want a wide release and were only offering the movie to certain prestigious cinemas but it is actually the opposite. It means that the theaters were not interested in buying the film.

In this case I can totally understand why a cinema owner wouldn't want this film because it almost certainly would have been met with bad reviews immediately upon release. One reviewer that had the misfortune of sitting through the entire thing had this to say

"Unfortunately, the filmmaker's stylistic efforts aren't enough to compensate for the predictable, cliché-ridden aspects of the screenplay..."

It starts off in a really silly way when a family is presented as being quite affluent and has a pretty great home life. Nothing wrong with that. I celebrate this sort of presentation. However, things take a strange turn when they announce that they are going down south to a funeral and they all jump in the family's single-engine airplane and Dad just flies them the whole way there. This is made even more improbable when the family needed a break and they just land the plane in the street somewhere outside of a remote gas station.... because that's something that happens and isn't against the law at all.

They take a moment to point out how "backwoods" and potentially stupid small town people are and I thought this was mean. Big city producers picking on people who live in small towns is nothing new but they didn't need to do this and it isn't really a part of the storyline either.

Later something magical happens and the father is separated from his family in a way that is not explained fully as the film goes on but when it is revealed it is stupid and you don't even care.

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When Dad wakes up he is being cared for by a family in an old house in the middle of nowhere. They seem driven to keep him there in a sort of Stephen King's Misery sort of way. While this is extremely boring for the most part it was nice to see Loretta Devine as Ms. Eloise and she is definitely the best actor - or perhaps the only good one - in the entire film. We don't see much from her anymore these days and that is a shame. I think the fact that she has appeared in this turd of a film indicates that her career is basically over now.

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The entire film consists of Dad trying to escape and most of these attempts are pretty absurd. He is grievously injured with a broken leg of some sort and in one scene he is barely capable of hobbling to the bathroom and in the next he is jumping across rooftops like a cat. Continuity anyone? How much fun would have Misery been if the author just had spats of incredible dexterity? It just doesn't make sense but I suppose it doesn't matter because the rest of this film, outside of Loretta's performance, has very few redeeming qualities.

There is a bunch of stuff thrown in about voodoo and the occult and while this is meant to be interesting, it is just very clear that they had about 40 minutes of time they needed to fill up in order to achieve the obligatory 90 minutes to make a movie, and that is exactly what they did. This was where I started skipping large portions of the film with my trusty fast-forward button. In those sequences that I skipped I managed to miss almost zero essential parts of the plot, because there isn't really a plot here.

As you would expect, our "hero" eventually achieves victory and gets free. No big surprise there.

Should I watch it?

Despite a multi-million dollar budget this film managed to bring in a mere $500,000 at the box office and since this is such a conveniently round number for Paramount, I doubt the authenticity of this figure. I would be surprised if it made even that much.

I don't put a lot of faith in professional reviewers but this movie was panned across the board by anyone that bothered with it. I don't know if the movie makers were trying to cash in during the BLM times or what, but it wouldn't surprise me if they released this film when they did because they expected everyone to be afraid to call a spade a spade out of fear of online backlash against the reviewer. It isn't racist to call this a bad film. It would be a bad film if every single character in it was any ethnicity.

I would say that I want that 90 minutes of my life back but I didn't watch even an hour of it. While I can definitely appreciate people attempting to delve into the supernatural and the occult, they really just failed on every front as far as that presentation is concerned. This movie is boring and has very little in the way of quality acting in it. There are a couple of very gory scenes that might please gore fans out there, but if you want to see those just look those up. There is no reason to see the other 88 minutes of this movie that surround those parts.