2 Guys And A Chainsaw

Thanks to Tanya and Chiller Theater for requesting this witchy haunted house story that left us scratching our heads. What is going on here, exactly? Why does this movie have such a cult following online? Why are the people here doing dumb things? And why were we kinda bored through most of it?

We try to answer all these questions and more in our last episode of January. Enjoy, and stay tuned for more fun and games in February!

Expand to read episode transcript Automatic Transcript

Superstition (1982)

Episode 321, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd. And I’m Craig. Well, today we, uh, are going continuously into the rabbit hole of early eighties. Um, I would say somewhat obscure films. Yeah, I’ve had my eye on this movie that we’re doing today for quite some time. It also happened to be recommended by.

Listeners, Tanya and uh, someone behind the Moniker Chiller Theater. The name of the movie is Superstition from 1982. It’s an unrated horror movie that was mostly direct to video. I think it was done in 1981. and, uh, had a brief theatrical release in 1982 in Italy, uh, around the same time in Los Angeles, I believe, maybe a couple years later, and then went straight to video and apparently had quite a following 

Craig: in the uk and then got another theatrical release after the success of its video release, I think there, which is weird.

That hardly ever happens. 

Todd: Yeah. In 1985. The movie was sold to me pretty heavily. Uh, it wasn’t just, um, these two people who requested it, but I was reading about it on some horror sites and I acquired it some time ago, and I’ve been, it’s been on my list for quite a while. It was spoken quite highly of as being this cool mashup of, uh, like a diallo with slasher sensibilities from the early eighties and really gory, and really creepy and uns.

Yeah, so it was sure. Something that’s for sure. . 

Craig: So I had never heard of it. Uh, and like the box art didn’t look familiar at all. No. Um, I looked at, I looked at the cast list. Nobody, there’s one person in the whole movie that I recognized from something Justin W Right. The 

Todd: little kid. The kid . 

Craig: Yeah. I’m surprised you knew.

He played like the annoying younger brother and a lot of things in the eighties. He, he’s a funny guy. Yeah. Uh, he was in, um, just one of the guys that, like the one where the, the really hot chick dressed up as a guy in her high school. That was, he was in that, he was good. That was on TV a lot. Uhhuh . So I recognized him, but that was, that was pretty much it.

But I. Looking forward to it because I, you know, I, I try not to read too much about these things before we actually watch them, especially if I don’t know much about them. I prefer to kind of go in blind. But I did read the, uh, like viewer reviews on I M D B and they’re glowing, like these are glowing reviews about how this is, you know, uh, A forgotten gem of eighties horror and like this is eighties horror done right, and I can’t believe more people don’t know about this movie.

I don’t get it. . Oh, 

Todd: I don’t, I don’t trust anything on the internet anymore. Look every time. We go down these rabbit holes with these supposed and forgotten gems, it gets baffling. And then we’ll find some movie that’s got mixed reviews and we absolutely love it. So yeah, maybe we’re just outside the pulse of of mainstream society or something, because.

I found this movie to be weird and hokey and pedestrian and almost boring at times. Yeah, it was 

Craig: boring. I really didn’t enjoy it at all. It was really kind of stupid. Um, and it felt long and it’s not long. It’s only an hour and 25 minutes long. Oh man. But it sure felt longer than that. Yeah. Gosh, I don’t know.

This one’s gonna be a tough one cuz I don’t like, I almost felt like nothing really happens. Well, um, I guess people die, but it’s, yeah. It’s, it’s a haunted. and you get a little bit of, you know, eventually a little bit of backstory, which is a fine backstory. There’s nothing wrong with it. Um, nothing particularly unique or original.

And you do get a relatively, I suppose, kind of creative kill every 10 minutes or so. But that’s it. Like Yeah. There’s, there’s not, there’s not really much notable to say about it. 

Todd: It’s so. God, I don’t know, like nobody involved in this movie except for that. Justin kid is really known for much of anything.

The director, James W. Roberson didn’t do much. 

Craig: No. He did like three other movies. The director did a lot and continues to do a lot of work in cinematography. Like That’s true, that’s true camera work. Um, but yeah, he only directed a few other things and some of the, like the guy who’s the lead guy, I guess, uh, James Howten was in soaps and like nighttime soaps, uh, in the eighties.

And the guy that plays the dad. Of the family that moves into the house. Um, he had done quite a bit. There was, I don’t know, a couple of things I recognized him from, but yeah, pretty much everybody else. Mm, not much, uh, no. Going on. Not that that matters. I mean, 

Todd: no, it doesn’t, 

Craig: it no great. Typically doesn’t matter.

And that Right, and that’s, that’s par for the course with these types of eighties movies, which is why. I was surprised because you say, you know, maybe we’re, we don’t have our finger on the pulse. No. This should be right up our alley. Hmm. You know, this should be exactly the kind of thing that we usually really enjoy and really enjoy talking about.

We of all people are incredibly nostalgic for eighties horror. Yeah. And, and we, we do it all the time. We talk about it all the time. We, some of our most fun episodes have been talking about these kind of movies, but this one just doesn’t, like I said, there’s just nothing. Particularly interesting to say about it.

I mean, it’s, yeah, it’s not, it’s not so bad. It’s good. It’s not so good. It’s, no, sadly. Yeah. There aren’t any like standout performances or Okay. It’s a, you know, we’ve done a couple movies where, okay, it’s a terrible movie, but it’s worth it alone for this scene. No, there, there’s nothing like that here. Uh, yeah.

It’s, uh, it’s unfortunate. I, I, I want, you know, I try to be a positive person. I like to have positive things to say about things , but I just, I don’t know. I don’t even know 

Todd: where to start here. Yeah, I don’t wanna say it doesn’t have focus, it just doesn’t, like you said earlier, there’s not a lot happening.

I mean, I feel like a lot’s happening, but there’s not really a bulk behind it. It’s like a skeleton of a plot without much hanging on it. I, I don’t really know how to describe it. I mean, it’s like there is a plot, there’s a backstory. I mean, I feel like on. This had some promise. It’s like one of those horrors that’s kind of rooted in history.

This, this witch from 8 16 92, you know, who was put to death and not wrongfully though. Not 

Craig: even, right? Not wrongfully. 

Todd: Yeah, not wrongfully put to death by a priest and kind of condemned to this , this pond. . Yeah. Not a lake, you know, not an ocean, but a pond. I’m sure we’ll get to all this later, but I have so many questions about the backstory behind this movie.

And then, uh, you know, modern day, there’s like house upon house upon house upon house that’s built on this land and each, you know, it seems to be cursed land because yeah, everybody dies. Everybody dies all the time, yet people still wanna move in. , stop building 

Craig: houses there. It’s 

Todd: like, what is wrong with you?

Owned by a church by now. And it’s almost like an afterthought. They’re like, oh yeah, we have this house. We almost forgot we own it. What went on there? Oh, there was a murder there. Inspector last, uh, last week or yesterday? Oh shit. We thanks for. It’s gonna go 

Craig: into foreclosure if we don’t do something about it.

And, and if we don’t do something about it, it’s gonna get torn down. Who cares? Nobody, like only a couple old freaks live over there anyway. And like, you’re not doing anything with it. Let it go. What is, I don’t, what’s the point? 

Todd: Stupid . It’s so, so silly. 

Craig: Like you said on paper. I think it could be okay. In fact, I read that eventually, or eventually.

Originally it was much simpler in scope, like, uh, It was just a, a story about a family who moves into a house that’s haunted by a witch. That’s it. Then they added some other characters, like they added the character of there’s this mute that like Is the caretaker’s son or something? I don’t know. Oh boy.

I don’t know. They added his character. I don’t know why. Because you could excise his character from the movie entirely and lose nothing. Well, it’s 

Todd: almost like the movie has already excised his character, like we’re introduced to him and then he’s completely insignificant. Even when he comes in at the end, it doesn’t even matter.

Craig: Yeah, . No, it doesn’t. It makes absolutely no difference. He’s kind of a red herring, but not even really. And then there’s this little girl. Character who keeps popping up randomly and for no reason 

Todd: like it. I have no idea. I still have no idea what her significance is to this story. 

Craig: Well, I, I do cuz it’s revealed at the end.

It’s dumb. Oh, okay. So anyway, what I was, what I was getting at was this could. , it’s very much in the same vein as the Amityville Horror. In fact, that would be the movie that I would compare it the most to. Mm-hmm. Because it doesn’t really pull any punches. Uh, it is pretty gory and pretty much everybody dies, including the kid, which.

Doesn’t happen a lot. Yeah. That was 

Todd: surprising. Yeah. 

Craig: Uhhuh, . And, uh, so, you know, it, it’s similar in that way. It even has kind of some similarities with, uh, Poltergeist. Um, and maybe even like, I was kind of the feel of it, the feel of the movie except for the Gore, which. Fairly graphic. It almost felt kinda like a, the watcher in the woods kind of deal, witchy housed and Mm, 

Todd: you’re right cuz the old lady.

Craig: Right. And it, it just kind of had that feel to the cinematography of it. But I liked all of those movies. And I didn’t like this one. . 

Todd: I felt it also had sort of JLo aspirations. It was almost, in a way, plot-wise, almost as baffling as your typical Italian JLo movie is. There’s a plot there and you can kind of discern it, but it doesn’t always make a lot of sense, and there’s incredible leaps of.

Logic that characters are able to make in interesting ways, and it’s going for style. I, I can tell, I can say that the director definitely was going for something fairly stylish. I think some of the cinematography in here is, is spooky, or at least trying to be spooky. There’s a lot of P O V shots that could be creepy, but they really.

and there’s some special effects work in here that’s trying really hard. Like 

Craig: what? I don’t even know what you’re talking about because I don’t know, like I just watched it today. I just watched it a few hours ago and I don’t, I, I don’t remember anything about it cuz I was bored. Uh, 

Todd: yeah. , well, I thought early in the movie when, when you kind of don’t know what’s going on, there’s a lot of p o v stuff of somebody creeping ar you know, it’s, it’s obviously like somebody’s creeping around and you pop that pops in and out.

toward the end of the movie when the witch kind of manifests herself. You never really see her, but there’s a lot of smoke and a lot of shadows and yeah, the creepy, you know, long fingernails and hands and stuff. And I thought fairly interesting camera angles, though. Nothing that really calls too much attention to itself, which is sometimes good.

It was very, you know, it was lit in spooky ways and, and, you know, beams of light here and there, and blues and reds and stuff. ultimately, I guess like you, I was just kind of bored with it. So none of that really mattered because I didn’t care what really, what was going on. After a while, it just, no, it was like somebody was telling me, narrating a story to me, Uhhuh, , you know, and I’m just watching the plot unfold.

But, uh, That’s about it. I wasn’t very emotionally invested in it. No, 

Craig: no. And it’s, and it’s not scary. Like No, sadly no. I didn’t think it was scary at all. I mean, it’s a little bit, people certainly die. Um, and there’s blood and like some of that is violent. Like one girl gets her head like nailed to the ground.

like

Todd: your eye with a giant wooden spike and a hammer. Yeah. I mean, And it’s, and it doesn’t pull too many punches on that either. No. But, uh, no. So 

Craig: it is, I mean, there is that violence and, and stuff, but just the story isn’t even really all that interesting. Like, it, it opens on this, I say spooky old house kind of, it just looks like an old abandoned house.

There’s not really anything all that spooky about it. It’s 

Todd: big. It’s not even that spooky. . It’s a weird house too, right? It’s, it’s very almost kind of modern looking. It seems kind 

Craig: of modern. Uhhuh, . There’s one point where the mom comes from the upstairs to the downstairs and she like, the stairwell is huge.

Like, I was like, what is this? It looks like a stairwell in a castle or, but very like eighties, modern. Yeah. Cuz the 

Todd: walls are like a smooth marble up and down with no decoration on them at all. Just like a sconce here and there. It almost reminded me of a ma, like a Maza. Lium in a way. Kind of, kind of. I don’t know if that was what they were like kind of going for, but then you come to the kitchen and it’s this tiny little kitchen you’d find in like a very small like colonial American house.

It’s really bizarre. Actually, I have 

Craig: no, I, right. I have no idea if this is true because there’s really not, I, I couldn’t find much information about this movie or the production or anything, but I almost got the sense that they just found a location and just kind of built the script around it. Like, that’s why they had to say, oh, lots of houses have been built here.

But, um, all of the people died and all of the houses were destroyed because it’s not an. Fan. You know, like it’s not a traditional old spooky house. It’s just some random modern 

Todd: house. Much more interesting houses have been built here in the past. Yeah. . But we’re sadly stuck with this. Not spooky, very modern house

That’s exactly 

Craig: right. And it, it starts out, so this couple is, uh, parked. Apparently this is a make out spot. God, there, uh, at some point it’s no deal why the. Specter, there’s an inspector. At some point the cop is like explaining what happened. Cuz these kids, uh, the kids who, um, were parked there making out, I don’t think they get killed.

It’s a prank. A couple of guys, young guys, Charlie and Artie, Charlie and Artie, they’re playing a prank and you know, they like toss some dummies at this card to scare these. Kids out or whatever. Yeah. Um, but then they are both looking around the house and , um, Artie gets killed by a microwave. Ghost. . . 

Todd: It’s so weird.

Artie’s walking around. He’s creeping around in the house. Oh, well. Well, Charlie’s out in the bushes. He throws like a dummy at the kids in the car. And I guess Artie’s task is to scream Manuel like a witch from the inside the house. because then he kind of wanders downstairs and the house is just full of junk.

And the kitchen Uhhuh, , there’s just a microwave sitting there. It turns on the door opens, and then some kind of unseen force throws him at the ceiling and he falls down. And then we cut to Charlie, who’s like, Artie, Artie, where are you? And he probes around through the house for a while. And there’s these p o shots, like somebody’s looking at ’em.

There might have been a jump scare too in there. I kind. I mean, you know, I was, I was willing to go with the movie at this point. He wasn’t unlike a lot of other openings for other more promising films. Then he goes into that room and of course, uh, Artie has nowhere to be seen, but the microwave lights up and you see something’s in the microwave.

The microwave door swings open and. Artie’s head is inside there and it explodes and it explodes. 

Craig: So Charlie runs while the witch laughs. Ominously. At this point, we don’t know it’s a witch, I don’t think. I don’t know, but it’s like a woman’s laughter. No, who knows. Um, and then he tries to go out the window and he’s trying to raise the window, but it won’t raise.

So instead the upper pain comes down and he starts to climb through that, but then it starts to raise again and literally cuts him in 

Todd: half. That was kind of cool. I like. I was down with this. It was kind of 

Craig: cool and like one of the, one of the reviews I read was like, I knew in the first 10 minutes that you know, they weren’t gonna pull any punches and this was gonna be an awesome ride.

Well, yeah. Okay. I’ll give it that. This opening sequence was, Okay. Like nothing spectacular, but it was all right. It could have been good from there, but really no. So then we meet, um, Reverend David who is tasked with taking care of the shek or Shara or whatever place it’s called, and we hear that lots of houses have been build billed there.

And the inspector, I don’t even know what his name is, I just called him the inspector cuz he’s always around. He’s this older. 

Todd: Inspector Sturgis and his trustee, right-hand man, Jack Hollister. Yeah. 

Craig: Yeah. And Inspector Sturgis is like, uh, telling the priest about this place and he’s like, you also have standing water on the property.

Black pond. Kids like the skinny dip. They had midnight and sometimes they drown. Inspector, the property is posted against trespassing. It really doesn’t matter. It’s a make out place. It always has been. I got my first. Uh, nevermind. . 

Todd: Well, can I also ask you, I mean, come on, this takes place in the US right? I don’t know.

Where in the United States have we ever called police detectives? Inspectors? I don’t know. Isn’t that a British thing? Inspector so-and-so from somewhere, 

Craig: I guess. I don’t know. Oh God. Yeah. I mean, I’ll, it seemed like all the guys in the, the Diallo movies or inspector somebody, maybe that’s what they were going for.

I don’t know. Uh, but anyway, what, like, and the, the thing is like, I usually take way too many notes. I take pages and pages of notes. Then I don’t even look at them. I have like half a page of notes on here because hardly anything happens. I had 

Todd: to have a lot of notes just to keep track of all the characters cuz we’re introduced to a lot of people really quickly, kind of well, and I was trying really hard to keep 

Craig: their name.

Arlen, the mute guy who is, I guess the son of the caretaker, but the caretaker is this little old woman who just stays, her name’s Elvira, and she’s this creepy, weird looking old lady who really never leaves her shack. So I don’t know what kind of caretaker she is. 

Todd: She’s a pretty shitty 

Craig: caretaker. Yeah.

The place is in complete disrepair, so to call her the caretaker is a little bit misleading, but whatever. Yeah, that’s what they call her and arlen’s. Her kid who’s a mute and doesn’t talk to anybody, just runs away. When anybody tries to talk to ’em or whatever. Some investigator is like standing on the dock at the pond, and for unexplained reasons, all the change falls.

Pants, like through his pocket, his down his pant 

Todd: leg. What was that about? ? 

Craig: I have no idea. Like the ghost pulled a thread or something. Did he 

Todd: have a sudden hole break open in his pocket? Oh God. 

Craig: I don’t know. I know. But he bends over to pick it up and then he gets pulled into the pond. Yeah. David, David says he’s talking to the inspector because they’re just always there.

That’s the other thing that bothers me. Yes. Like eventually, eventually they move a family into this house. Father David and the inspector and the cops are always there. Like 

Todd: they’re there every day 

Craig: all the time. Are they moving into all day, every day? all day and all night. Every day they’re there. . It doesn’t make any 

Todd: sense.

Also, this pond, it’s, it’s a tiny little pond, like back in 1692 or whatever. I, God, this pond is probably, should have been all dried up by now, or at least dried up, you know. 20 times over the ensuing, you know, 300 years or so. So it’s kind of silly when you see the size of this thing, but it’s got a little dock on it for tiny little boats.

to like paddle three paddles and get to the other side. It’s really kind of lame. and then, you know, they’re so, they’re all kind of around the pond and David’s like, I guess they can’t find this guy in this tiny little pond 

Craig: because he got pulled in. Did we say that 

Todd: something reaches out of the pond and pulls him in?

Yeah, that’s right. So they know he’s fallen into the pond. They know he’s presumably dead, but they can’t find him. So David’s like, I’m gonna drain the pond. And later a scene or two later, the inspector kind of chastises him. His shitty pumping equipment or not having enough funds, like not spending the church funds on adequate pumping equipment.

Like what are they supposed to stock? A 

Craig: water pump. Like something, yeah, something is, I know he says it’s like, you know, it keeps, it keeps getting C clogged with silt or something. I’m like, oh, it must be a ghost silt or something. So apparently the. 

Todd: The police and nobody else has any, uh, you know, resources to pump this tiny ass pond or get anyone down in there to drag up whatever body might be in there.

But they 

Craig: do find a big cross in there. Yeah. They find this cross in there. It ends up being important later on. I didn’t even write it down. At first, I’m like, who cares? So what? . Oh boy. You found trash in the pond. Congratulations. Woohoo. Mm-hmm. . But then this, that priest who’s like chastising him or whatever, they walk into another room where I guess there’s construction going on, like why they are renovating this crappy house.

I, I don’t know, whatever. But there’s construction going on and. Something that doesn’t happen happens like , like some guy’s cutting boards with a circular saw. Mm-hmm. and the blade of the circular saw just comes off but continues spinning at maximum velocity and goes all the way. Like it, it, it hits this priest in the chest, shoots him back into a chair, and then continues to saw completely through his body.

Yeah. Before coming to a stop as it drops to the floor at the. What, and nobody thinks that this is weird. Yeah. like nobody even really comments about it. Nobody like it just happens and it’s over and then carry 

Todd: on. . Yeah. They’re like, oh, that terrible accident with that priest. Like what? This is like some weird supernatural shit.

also, they don’t 

Craig: care. David meets this little girl, Mary. She’s just this little blonde girl and white. That’s it. She just pops up every once in a while. That’s all. They don’t 

Todd: care either. They don’t know where she came from. They don’t question it. No. 

Craig: And she like, when he meets her, he’s like, he said, do you live here?

Like, no. You would obviously know she doesn’t live there. You idiot, but, but she’s like, no, I used to live here. It’s like, okay, well just hang out. Like whatever, and then they just don’t pay any attention to him. Okay. So then they move in this family, it’s the Leahy family. And the dad, I guess, is also a minister, though.

They never make any mention of that again. But I, the only reason I know is because he’s listed as Reverend something. In the cast list. But anyway, the dad is George, the mom’s Melinda. They have two teenage daughters, Anne and Cheryl, A blonde and a Burnett. Mm-hmm. . And then the, the son Justin, who is that kid from the eighties that I recognize.

He’s really young here. I don’t know that I’d ever necessarily seen him this young. Mm-hmm. , but then there’s like an inspector or something. I don’t even. I swear I had to keep going back and rewinding this, I think because I really wasn’t paying attention because I was just bored. Uh, , I don’t even know what happened.

Like this inspector is down in the basement or something and then all of a sudden he falls into a shaft and gets hung. What is this? Is it like an elevator shaft? Is it a dumb waiter, shaft? There’s some 

Todd: elevator. They refer to it as an elevator shaft. I don’t know why there’s an elevator in this, in this house.

Two-story 

Craig: house that they don’t use and 

Todd: why it extends down. In the basement, it goes down and not up . So I don’t know where that’s going. Yeah. But he, he, he pops his head into it and then suddenly I think it’s like the cables jut out and wrap around his neck and pull him in, or he gets caught up in the cables and hunk.

And at the same time, Justin, the, the boy come, kind of comes in. I think he hears something, kind of comes in to see what’s up and he walks around and he doesn’t find anything, but he doesn’t find the guy either. But Mary comes up behind him and says Hi, and then leaves again. And then, uh, we, we, we cut back to the pond and the girls are swimming in there.

It’s the blonde girl, she’s in the water. The other girl’s, Cheryl is sunning herself and she starts screaming in the water and says, something’s got my foot. Somebody’s got my. And David’s there too, and the inspector’s there, they’re all just hanging out. Of course he is. . Then he pulls her out and there’s a severed hand attached to her leg, like it tried to grab 

Craig: Right.

Which I guess was the hand of the guy that got pulled into the pond. Yeah, but they dragged the pond and never found him, I guess, which is also. Unexplained God, what else? So then Inspector Sturgis tells David about the Montclair family who used to live there. just out of nowhere, like this is just random exposition.

Oh, by the way, this other family lived here, but they all died . One of them was hung and one of them got spiked to the attic floor, and one of them was just torn apart. Just so you know, , I. Right. They never talk about it like again, . I, I guess maybe it’s foreshadowing because one of them gets their head spiked to the attic floor later.

I don’t know God. Mm-hmm. . And then for, for reasons that I don’t understand, the girl who almost round is sleeping in her bed when she all of a sudden has visions of all of the murders that have happened that we’ve seen so far, she has visions of them. Plus I think she also has some visions of the past, but that just randomly happens.

And then, Justin finds the dead guy in the basement and presumably gets killed. I mean, he is, he’s dead. Cause we, the only time we see him again is later when we see his body. Um, but I don’t think we really saw what happened to him. I feel like he just gets 

Todd: grabbed or something. Yeah, kind. He kind of gets grabbed and then he goes missing.

And then it seems like their new task is to find Justin where the heck he went. But also like there’s a scene where George, who has a baffling role in this. He just kinda wanders around in sort of a semi dazed Stupor. Yeah. Like he’s not even engaged in life. It’s so weird. And he wanders into the basement and he pulls out a bottle and starts drinking from it.

Ju you know, actually this is before Justin disappears, but Justin interrupts him and he kind of hides it and then he goes upstairs and we see the bottle. Ominously, you know, tip over of its own accord and spill out the liquor again. All this doesn’t end up meaning anything. No, except that. Ooh, the house is spooky right then I think it’s, uh, David is talking to the lady, uh, next door.

Elvira the caretaker. Yeah. And she’s real, being really cagey about everything. He asked for the history of the house and do you know where your son is? 

Craig: I told you he is lost to me forever. 

Todd: You say that as if you think he’s. He 

Craig: is in a secret place his father knew and his father and his. He protects his mistress who dominate you.

His mistress. 

Todd: He 

Craig: guard her, protects her cruelties. Her leavings. He guard you against her. Oh my God, I missed all of this. Oh God, I missed all that. So is the, is the suggestion then that that mute guy is working for the witch? Uh, I guess that would kind of make sense. Ultimately, is she, is she the mistress 

Todd: now that you mention it?

It might be God, but she, she says he’s being held there by his mistress, but he’s also guarding them from her. And Hollister just kind of dismisses her as loony and walks off. It’s all kind of a very stage. Dumb interaction. Really? 

Craig: It is, it’s dumb. I mean it like, she literally is like hanging out the window of her cottage , like it’s just dumb.

And, uh, she, she says she used to only be able to come out at night, but they removed the cross from the pond, so now she can come out whenever she wants. Okay. Who cares? Like , what a stupid plot point. Like why do we need to know that? Whatever she’s out, who cares? Yeah. Um, but, but she tells David, you must complete the ritual with fire o Okay.

Like, yeah. What ritual lady? Like if, if you’ve got something to say to spit it 

Todd: out. Well, she does. You don’t, she does tell David to check the archives of St. Luke’s for more information. You know, he kind of runs off, he leaves the house finally and goes to St. Luke’s to check the archives. Meanwhile, Sturgiss is gonna stay over for supper.

this investigator, oh my God, it’s so hilarious. They’re like, uh, try to get David to stay for supper. And, uh, he’s like, no, I gotta go check the archives. But you know, inspector Sturgiss will want to, and Sturgiss is very in interested in staying for supper and he’s also gonna help them find Justin. . And so anyway, he goes and uh, he ends up at the archives.

David, right? Cheryl’s now talking. Oh yeah. And then her dad . I love it. David goes upstairs, he can’t find Justin anywhere. He goes upstairs. Cheryl just suddenly starts talking trash about her dad, Cheryl, who we’ve barely seen. Her dad, who we’ve barely seen. Mom. 

Craig: It’ll be all right. Daddy’s down there. It’ll be all right.

Oh, sure. Daddy’s down there. He knows what to do. Daddy always knows just exactly what to do. Cheryl don’t, especially when he wants to run lives. That’s a crackup, isn’t it? He’s a burnout and he’s trying to run my life, Cheryl. He can’t do anything, right? He’s a waste mom. A burnout. Shut your bitchy. That was my favorite part of the movie.

Oh, so hilarious. That was the only part I liked. Oh, I’m, I, that’s one. You know, all the time in movies, there are lines and I’m like, oh my God. I, I just need to pull that out all like, I, I just am gonna start saying to you, shut your bitchy mouth, . Oh, it’s too good. It’s too good. I love that. It, and, and it was just this tension, like this family tension.

Comes out of nowhere and leads nowhere. Yeah. Like, I don’t know if, if they were trying to suggest, because this happens in other haunted house movies, like Right Amityville, like, like the, the malevolent force starts to have an effect on the people and they, maybe they start lashing out in anger or doing things uncharacteristic of themselves or whatever.

But if that’s meant to be the suggestion, it totally falls flat because, Nothing else comes of it. They just have this little spat and move on. It’s 

Todd: so infrequent and it’s sudden and it’s melodramatic and that it’s done and never spoken of again. No, but David, 

Craig: meanwhile, he’s a The only go. Yeah. He finds, he finds some old book.

Oh God. But you know, it’s research. It’s the research mode. It’s so stupid. I know he finds some old book in the church basement. No, he’s 

Todd: just with the priest in the church basement. There are like two shelves there and the priest walks through. Oh, here’s a book I’ve never noticed before, I guess, right?

Look, it’s the Omans. Malorum or something like that. Wait, that’s the book from the Spanish Inquisition. Yes. The Order of Exorcism Punishment by Heresy and the Methods of Extracting Confessions. It’s written in English. You see old style. What the I 

Craig: didn’t get this at all. I know. No, it doesn’t even make any sense.

None of it makes sense. It’s Stu, it’s just a device. It’s a stupid, uh, exposition device to explain what happened in the end. And so he reads in 30 seconds, you know, he immediately finds the right page. This story of. Of Alandra shek who was a witch, and the town’s people like tied her up to a giant pole and, uh, drown her.

And she was a witch. You know, like when they’ve got her, she like, she, uh, she speaks in this scary demonn voice. And then, yeah, this is all flashback, Uhhuh and yeah, to like the 16 hundreds or whatever. And then when they. Um, erected this pole that she’s tied to right next to the, the pond. I mean, it’s probably a 10 foot beam that she’s tied to.

Then her face like starts 

Todd: contorting bladder effects on 

Craig: her forehead, Uhhuh , like the demonn is coming out or something. So they drown her. And then it just basically just says that bad shit happened to the townspeople afterwards. Like a bunch of people died 

Todd: and the priest like says, some incantation says something, let this cross like, uh, seal you here forever, as long as it stays in the pond or whatever.

So he tosses the cross into the pond too after her and. So I think the fact that they pulled the cross out of the pond is what supposedly set her loose. Even though shit was going down before they took the cross outta the pond just apparently was happening at night. So, you know, she was only like, right.

Ugh. It’s so weird and I don’t get it. This is the Spanish Inquisition, but this is America. I, I, I 

Craig: don’t have any idea what’s going on. It’s dumb . I, I guess they were maybe using the methods from the Spanish Inquisition on this woman because she was a witch. It doesn’t matter. It’s stupid. It there, there’s really no, okay.

It’s haunted. We get it. There’s a witch and she’s haunted. Fine. Whatever. Okay, so meanwhile back at the house, the inspector find, I don’t know, he realizes that, The basement is like bigger than the rest of the house. Yes. Or something. Yes. So, so he, he, he thinks, oh, there must be like a secret entrance or something in the ground outside.

Yes. Here, let me dig in this one particular spot for five seconds. Right. Until I find this enormous secret hatch. 

Todd: It’s an inch. It’s basically, A big wooden trap door in the ground that’s been covered by some straw. He, he lifts it up, looks down, sees a door down there, an underground door that leads to some underground place and is like, okay, you wait here and guard this, closes it and decides to go into the basement and break through the wooden wall.

Why don’t you go through the freaking door? Just go in the door. I know. I’m thinking like Justin had gone into the basement and like clawed his way through a wall and boarded it up behind him. It made no sense. 

Craig: No, it doesn’t make any sense at all. Oh God. Um, we, we, we get, we go back to David for just a second until we find out that the priest who was responsible for the witch’s execution was pressed to death.

In, in what? I don’t know what that was. Was that supposed to be a wine press? I guess? Yeah. I wasn’t sure either. So then we back to the inspector. He’s looking for the hidden room, which he immediately finds. Yeah. And it’s a secret bedroom with the body of the worker who had died in the shaft. I think so. I wasn’t sure.

But anyway. And Arlen, the mute is also in there and he’s. Fights the cop, but he gets knocked out by the, uh, inspector and gets taken away in handcuffs and we never see him again. Again, like the, yeah. There’s no purpose to this character at all. It’s so obvious that he was just written in and they say like, uh, I guess they rented it.

They ri they wrote him and Mary in to make it more interesting. Well, they failed because it’s not more interesting. It’s just confusing and stupid. Yeah. Um, then the inspector gets dragged away by the witch. The witch by the way, is just this shadowy figure with like demonn black arms and, and enormous like demonn claws.

You never see it. 

Todd: Yeah. We never see her. We just see the arm with the 

claw. 

Craig: Yeah. Right. And then once there is a image that is reminiscent of like the box art, which is just like a tall shrouded figure in silhouette. We see that one time. But that’s the most, uh, we ever see of the switch. 

Todd: Yeah. And I love during this entire ordeal, the inspector who has told George, you go upstairs and you stay up there and you don’t come down like, no, I need to be with you.

This is my son. No, you go. I don’t know why. I don’t know why George couldn’t join them, you know, in their little excursion, but, okay. Very obedient. George goes upstairs and is not gonna leave his bedroom for anything. His wife is like, they’re hearing all these noises and some screaming and all that, and she’s like, we need to go down, see what’s going on.

He’s like, Nope. He told me not to go down. I don’t think so, Steve, 

Craig: that’s wrong. So he does, so the mom goes down by herself to check stuff out and the, like, the lights are flashing and she finds her kid hanging upside down from the ceiling at like, I don’t know, he’s got big, long scratches all on his face and on his torso.

Yeah. I, I was, I don’t know. I figured he was dead because he had disappeared, but I, I admit that I was a little bit surprised. Yeah, because he is really young, I would say he’s. 12. Um, like prepubescent, he’s still got a prepubescent voice. Yeah. Uh, so I was kind of surprised. But then again, you didn’t 

Todd: expect kids to die in horror movies like 

Craig: this?

Usually not. But in this movie, I actually kind of figured because it seemed, unless there was gonna be some, you know, reversal of fortune and they were gonna win, it seemed like everybody was gonna die. That’s what’s always happened historically, according to everybody. Mm-hmm. . Um, so, . So whatever. He’s dead, um, she gets somehow trapped in the kitchen and the witch supernaturally throws her around a little bit.

Mm-hmm. David arrives at the house and like Elvira hangs out her window and say, you’re the cross is your only hope. Okay. Thanks 

Todd: lady. He closes the door. She, oh, this caretaker is not doing a great job. No, it’s dumb. But he’s got two cans of gasoline, I guess he. , he’s gonna burn her because I guess a combination of what Elvira said and which lore, I dunno.

He’s got a couple gans of gas on, but he sets ’em down. He runs up into the house and he finds George, who’s still just standing in a stupor Now he’s downstairs though, and he is like, you, you gotta help me, Melinda. She’s, she’s trapped in the kitchen and he’s like, okay, alright. Where is she? Well, she’s over here.

They open up the kitchen door, they look inside, she’s not there. He says, oh, I swear. She was just, And then he just leaves and he like, you could have checked the stairs to the basement. You could have checked the door that goes outside, but he is like, there’s no time for this. David runs upstairs and grabs the two girls and tries to bring them down.

Craig: Just Anne, because one of the girls, 

Todd: the, well, he grabs both of ’em, but. Cheryl hangs back. Oh, that’s right. That’s right. Because she hears some voices or whatever. In the meantime, David gives the keys to Anne. The blonde chick tells her, go out the front door, get in my car, and drive away and leave. Why? What?

D shouldn’t she wait for you? Like how are you planning to leave right. With all these other people here? Uhhuh, . , but she can’t get out the front door, so David 

Craig: uses the cross to blow. Yes. . 

Todd: What was that? 

Craig: He just, he just thrusts the cross out the door and the door explodes. Like huge explosion out. Yeah. So I guess crosses can make things blow up.

I don’t know. Uh, so, so whatever, Anne runs out, uh, and then the dad finds the mom’s body in a. And then he gets killed. The witch kills the dad by blowing up a mirror in his face. Mm-hmm. . Um, meanwhile the witch is upstairs, staking Cheryl’s head to the ground, . All of this is happening at the same time. And then, uh, David like, is trying, he’s trying to get away.

I think maybe he sees her with her head. Steak to the ground, but then the witch appears. Right? And so he takes off running. Yeah. This is where she’s in silhouette. Yeah. He takes off running and he, he like jumps over the banister and falls down the stairs and the cross breaks, and I was like, oh no. Yeah, but I don’t know.

I, I guess it’s still okay 

Todd: until this moment he’s able to sta her off of this cross. It’s like, Like, she reaches her hand out towards him, and then he swings around with the cross and it’s like, ah, comes back. And then she, he kinda like, goes a couple more inches, then comes again, and he moves the cross in front of him.

It’s like, ah, it’s, it’s so hokey. Well, and 

Craig: then she, the witch comes like slowly down the stairs, like approaching him and it’s, it’s very ominous. And he just picks up this broken cross and like flashes it at her and she just disappears. Like, yeah, she’s just gone. Suddenly she’s not there. And he just thinks that everything’s over.

Like, oh, I did it, I guess. And so he goes, he goes outside and he opens up his van door and Anne’s dead body kind of rolls out. So I guess getting her out of the house didn’t do any good. So he sets the pond on fire. He sets 

Todd: the pond on fire. What? I don’t know what this guy’s thinking, but, uh, I don’t either.

I don’t get it. But he dumps the gasoline in the pond. He sets it on fire. Suddenly Mary shows up. We have not seen Mary for most of the movie. Suddenly she’s back. Right? And I, I don’t get this at all. He thinks it’s done. I guess he thinks setting the pond on fire fixed everything. There was nothing dramatic about him setting the pond on fire.

He just does it. Mary shows. and, uh, he says, it’s over, Mary, don’t worry. Uh, the witches dead we’re safe. And she said she would’ve 

Craig: been if the witch had been home, which again, doesn’t really make any sense. But what I read, I had no idea what was going on. Even though it ki it was kind of suggested.

Apparently Mary is also the witch. Like, just in another form. No way. Um, no way. Yeah, she, she is also the witch just in a different form. And so he stabs her with the cross. 

Todd: Does he I thought she just took it. 

Craig: No, I think he stabs her with it. Wow. I think he like stabs her in the chest with it, cuz remember at the bottom of it broke, so it was sharp at the bottom.

So I, I could be wrong. I wasn’t really paying attention, but 

Todd: I thought she was taking the cross and, and she said, you can’t kill me. And then the witch kind of like the witches disembodied voice is screaming, you don’t have the power to destroy me. And then Mary jumps into the pond. Uh, see, I 

Craig: thought he stabbed her and she caught on fire and fell in the pond.

I thought Mary was 

Todd: having like a screaming conversation with the witch. I don’t know. 

Craig: I think it’s just the two voices. I think it, I think they’re both the same person. It’s just the voices are going back and forth. But anyway, she falls and she’s like burning in the pond or whatever, and then I guess David thinks it’s all over.

He is just standing there. She turns around to walk away, but the witch hand comes out of the water and the witch laughs and grabs David, David by the leg and pulls him into the pond. And that’s it. The end. Everybody’s dead. We’re exactly where we were at the beginning. I guess the church can send more people out next week, to renovate this house or whatever.

It’s stupid. 

Todd: Oh, . What a dumb movie. I just, oh my God. Seriously. I did. In a way, it felt a lot like one of these old Lucci FCI movies that’s just bonkers off the wall in a whole bunch of stuff’s happening. But you don’t really know what it is, but it’s at least, it’s like stylish and it, it’s kind of interesting.

And there’s some gore and there’s some. Camera work and like viscerally engaging. This movie is just, it’s not engaging. I was just totally, no, and it was hokey. It was just really, really hokey and I wish I could say it was, you know, laugh out loud, funny at parts. , but not really. No. You, you didn’t really have a sense of humor about it.

Yeah, 

Craig: no, it’s not funny at all. Um, and, and you know, I don’t love the Dialo films the way that you do. I appreciate them for what they are, but the thing that I like most about them is that there’s always some sort of central mystery and, and, and the ones that we’ve seen, the mystery isn’t. Obvious. In fact, sometimes it’s seems contrived, right?

But at least it’s not obvious. Like it keeps you guessing. There’s really no mystery here. There’s really no intrigue at all there. There’s a, a witch who kills people who come to her house. That’s it. There’s nothing intriguing Yeah. About that. Like I feel like maybe. Of in the hands of better filmmakers.

They could have given the witch a more interesting backstory or, or given her more interesting motivations. But no, she’s just pissed that she got killed in the 16 hundreds, and anybody who comes to her house is gonna get up. That’s it. Yeah. like . 

Todd: Meanwhile, The only people on the property who have the knowledge to defeat her are completely uninterested in helping anyone Well, and, and 

Craig: El Elvira Elvira, the caretaker has the same last name as the Witch.

So, oh, is she supposed her like, long, like her great, great sisters granddaughter or something? Oh, interesting. I have no idea. I, I have no idea. It doesn’t make any sense. They, again, that, that the caretaker, uh, the caretaker’s son, Mary. You could have cut all of them out. They’re completely unnecessary. But then again, if you did, there wouldn’t be much of the movie because it’s not like you get any kind, you don’t get any kind of family dynamic.

Like that’s the other thing, like with the Amityville movies. Yeah. There’s a 

Todd: family breakdown. Yeah. And 

Craig: there’s, there’s a family dynamic and like you’re invested in what happens to this family. And even in those movies, it’s not like the families are like really likable or anything. In fact, Kind of not.

Yeah, but you’re invested in their plight and what’s going to happen to them. And I was not invested in these people at all. You don’t have the time. No. You don’t have the time to get, you know, to care about them and you’re not given anything that would make you care about them. They’re just a bunch of random people who show up and get picked off.

Todd: Well, once again, I feel like I’m saying this a lot recently, but there’s no central character. This isn’t really told through any one person’s perspective. There’s no one to really rally. There’s no obvious, oh, this guy’s gonna be, you know, maybe come in and save the day or whatever. You would think it would be David, but David’s gone half the time.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, he’s there, but he doesn’t really do anything. Like, uh, I don’t, it’s just a series of events and they’re not particularly interesting. I, the, the kills are fine, you know, they’re fine. They’re, the kills are cool. They’re, they’re fairly typical. Yeah, they’re fine. They’re fairly typical, uh, of this 

Todd: era.

The spike through the eye was pretty bloody also the, yeah, as improbable as it was, you know, the supernatural blade going through the priest was pretty cool. Yeah, I’d never seen that before. Fair. 

Craig: But I, God, I’ve seen other, houses haunted by a witch. Movies that I liked more than this. I, I think, um, I think it was Linda Blair and maybe David Hasselhoff we’re in a movie called like Witchery, which is about a house that haunted by a witch.

And I don’t even remember much about that movie, except for a couple of particularly gory scenes that have really stuck with me. Um, it was a bad movie, but at least it was interesting. I just, I can’t believe that we. 50 minutes out of talking about this , right? Sorry 

Todd: guys. Sorry, . We’re just as disappointed as you really, I mean, you know, I, I came into this with high hopes cuz it’s, uh, some, I just, you know, like you said, I just can’t understand it.

Sometimes people online will go on and on about some of these films and we watched ’em and we’re. I don’t get it. 

Craig: Well, I mean, even the box art is intriguing. It’s artistic and it looks cool. It doesn’t ultimately really have anything to do. I mean, I guess there’s the silhouetted witch, but she never carries some beautiful girl down a stairwell

I don’t, I don’t know. Like this is one of those, we watched it so you don’t have to. Yeah, I do not recommend wasting your time on this. Don’t bother. So many better movies that you could watch, um, even, you know, for, for the sake of being a completist, you’re really not missing anything. Yeah. This is not a notable film and it’s just as wild.

Unless I’m wrong. See, that’s the thing, you know, two people requested this. So there are people out there who like this movie and I swear I’m desperate. Contact us, let us know what, what is it that we are not. About cuz I just don’t get 

Todd: it. Yeah. But sometimes people send us to these movies for this very reason.

Craig, you know that like a couple times. That’s true. Yeah. We sent you to this movie cuz we also think it’s terrible. You know, we wanted to wanna hear you talk about it and that’s fine. Yeah, it’s wonderful. We love it. Yeah. 

Craig: And it is fun. It is fun to talk about. It’s more fun to talk about these movies for 45 minutes to an hour than it is to watch them.

Yeah. Sometimes they’re kind of a, like, like this time it was kind of a pain to watch. I, I guess the redeeming thing about the experience is at least I get to talk about it and, you know, with you and mm-hmm. rip on it a little bit. Yeah. If I , if I, if it weren’t for that, then I would really feel like I had wasted my 

Todd: time.

I’ve been curious about it for a very long time. It’s disappointing, but I’m glad I satisfied that curiosity. Yeah, really disappointed. I didn’t find like a hidden gem, but we’ve hit a couple hidden gems recently that was kind of fun. Like last week’s movie. Yeah, last week’s movie’s. Fun. It’s gonna take a lot of really terrible movies to get me off the high of last week’s movie, so , 

Craig: right?

Yeah. Fair enough. So thanks. Anyway, this, this movie, by the way, depending on where you live, uh, sometimes is titled Witch also. It, it’s not. Well, I always say things like it’s not easy to find. That’s not true. It’s not easy to find if you don’t wanna pay for it. If you don’t mind paying for it, paying for it, you can find it in a lot of places.

But we couldn’t find it. Uh, streaming anywhere for free, you know, it’s like a buck 99 on Google Play and, uh, YouTube Save your $2. . 

Todd: Yeah, it must have recently come available because a couple years ago when I was looking for this in earnest, I couldn’t even find it there. It was literally a very rare movie to find, which only intrigued me.

Yeah, don’t 

Craig: bother. Yeah, you can dollars, you can rent it and buy it on various platforms, but again, don’t bother

Todd: Well, thanks again for listening to another episode. If you enjoyed it, please share with a friend. Uh, you can find us just by googling two guys in a chainsaw podcast. And, uh, let us know what you thought of this movie. If you’ve seen us, we would love to hear some contrarian views. Yeah. Maybe somebody will point out something that we completely.

And we will be forever shamed. Also, consider contributing to our Patreon account. Become a patron of this podcast. Get a bunch of cool goodies, uh, some more discussion that we do every month through our two mini episodes, as well as an exclusive interview. And, uh, the behind the scenes of this podcast, which basically must the unedited phone calls, uh, that we do both the before and after we’re done talking about the movie.

So, uh, check us out at patreon.com/chainsaw podcast. Until next week. I’m Todd. And I’m Craig with Two Guys and a Chainsaw.