The Last Witch-Hunter (2015): written by Cory Goodman, Matt Sazama, and Burk Sharpless; directed by Breck Eisner; starring Vin Diesel (Kaulder), Rose Leslie (Chloe), Elijah Wood (Dolan 37), Michael Caine (Dolan 36), Olafur Darri Olafsson (Belial), and Julie Engelbrecht (Witch Queen):
Vin Diesel sports an unconvincing beard-and-wig combo for the medieval flashback sequences in this somewhat ungainly action-fantasy-horror hybrid. He's Kaulder, killer of the Witch Queen some time in the 1200's in Europe, cursed by her with immortality. He works for the Axe and Cross, a secret society of witch-fighters and, um, witch-regulators.
Assorted shenanigans convince Caulder, now in present-day New York and looking like the clean-shaven Vin Diesel we all know and love, that some bad witches strive now to bring the Witch Queen back to life. As the Witch Queen caused the Black Plague with magical Plague Flies, this could be bad. But not bad enough for anyone to notify the Centres for Disease Control!
The Last Witch-Hunter took a critical and box-office beating when it came out in 2015. It's not actually that bad. For example, it's much better than Solo, Warcraft, Alien: Covenant, and Tom Cruise's The Mummy. What praise, you say! What praise! It's about on par with the Netflix Will Smith movie Bright, also an ungainly action-fantasy-horror hybrid. Hey, at least they're trying for something other than another superhero movie.
Vin Diesel is Vin Diesel, and looks and acts pretty much like Vin Diesel once we get him out of all that fake hair. Rose Leslie (Game of Thrones) is fine as an unconvincing love interest, or maybe they're just going to be friends because nothing romantic happens in the movie. Michael Caine plays Michael Caine as a mentor figure. Elijah Wood is under-used and misused as a magical priest sidekick to Diesel. Someone named Julie Engelbrecht plays the Witch Queen under so much make-up and CGI than it did make sense not to cast a name actress as the main villain because she would be unrecognizable.
The direction of Breck Eisner is programmatic in the manner of a video-game adaptation. Or maybe a video-game cutscene. There are a few monster designs and production design moments that suggest real imagination in some of the visual effects houses that worked on the movie -- the spider-transformer-robot-thingie Jailer of the Witch-Prison is the best of these. In all, an adequate time-waster with enough goofy moments to keep it afloat. Lightly recommended.
Pyewacket (2017): written and directed by Adam MacDonald; starring Nicole Munoz (Leah Reyes), Laurie Holden (Mrs. Reyes), Chloe Rose (Janice), and Eric Osborne (Aaron): Enjoyable horror movie filmed in Canada's new horror hotbed, demon-haunted Sault Ste. Marie pretending to be New England (see also The Void).
Once you get over the fact that mother and daughter (played by Laurie Holden and Nicole Munoz) look nothing alike, the movie works for the most part. The daughter is clearly meant to look more like her deceased father than her mother so as to be a constant reminder of the mother's dead husband -- there is dialogue to that effect. But this is a bit too much, so much too much that I half-expected the mother to yell "You're not my daughter!" at some point.
Nicole Munoz plays Leah as the most wholesome-looking Goth ever, as are her three high-school friends. They're all into a Providence horror writer who apparently puts working spells in his novels. Say what you will about Stephen King, but he never did that!
So in a fit of adolescent angst (or possibly sociopathic behaviour), Leah calls upon the demon Pyewacket to kill her mother. Then she regrets it and tries to send the demon back before it kills her mother. Oops.
Pyewacket is a 'real' demon name, by the way. I'd previously run across it in the Kim Novak witch-romantic comedy Bell, Book and Candle (1958), also starring Jimmy Stewart. There, Pyewacket is Novak's cat/familiar.
The acting from the principals (there aren't many principals) is solid throughout. And there are some genuine scares, not all of them jump-scares. The film-makers keep most of the horror off-screen, and there's very little overt violence. The movie seems to make it clear that the supernatural is 'really' happening, but it does leave some room for doubt in the old Turn of the Screw manner. How much doubt depends on whether a viewer believes certain shots to be objective camerawork or subjective visions by Munoz's character.
Not a great movie, but the second half makes up a lot for the slowness of the first half, with the last ten minutes really singing. The filmmakers seem to me to have a lot of promise. And Pyewacket barely clocks in at 90 minutes, so it doesn't wear out its welcome. Lightly recommended.
