A man is kept captive by a sinister elderly couple in a slick piece of schlock that recalls far better and scarier movies
In
Halloween hoodoo horror Spell, protagonist Marquis is trying to escape a past of violence and poverty, a dogged struggle mirroring that of the film’s makers simultaneously trying to escape comparisons to past thrillers Skeleton Key and Misery, both sides as doomed as the other. There’s a cinematic slickness to the film (it was intended to be released theatrically until the pandemic) that separates it from its more noticeably shoddier fright night competitors but it’s mostly a familiar, if not entirely fruitless, trudge down a well-trodden path, one that takes us into, at times, questionable territory.
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