|
Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned) |
Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!
|
|
|
Related stuff you might want!!!(commissions earned) |
|
|
|
Big game hunter Mike Stacey (Bryant Haliday) has shot a lion in deepest
Africa ... which wouldn't be too big news, 'cause basically that's what
big game hunters tend to do on a long day, but he has shot the lion in
Simbaza country, and for the Simbazas, lions are sacred animals ...
The very night of Stacey's big kill, a delegation of Simbaza's show up
and curse him ...
The very next day, Stacey, his trusted bearer Saidi (Dennis Alaba
Peters) and his guide Lomas (Dennis Price) drive back to civilisation ...
when Saidi, influenced by some hoodoo, tries to stab Stacey, who is only
saved thanks to the timely intervention of Lomas, who chases Saidi away -
right into the arms of the Simbazas, as we soon learn, who use him as a
living voodoo doll, to have their revenge on Stacey.
Stacey meanwhile returns to London and tries to mend his relationship
wioth his estranged wife Janet (Lisa Daniely), who strongly disapproves of
his continuous hunting expeditions. And thus, Janet gives him the cold
shoulder at first, which leads Stacey to heavily drinking. ... and it
starts him to hallucinate, like hearing lions roar in the middle of London
when on a stroll one night (it later turns out that he was just walking by
the zoo) and starting to believe he is followed by Simbaza warriors -
which leads to a hilarious scene where two Simbaza tribesmen in full
native attire and warpaint hunt Stacey through a typical London park with
its carefully mowed lawn and the typical English fog ...
Now the hallucinations would be bad enough, but the fact that Stacey's
wound from a fight with the lion that started it all breaks open again is
really worrying. At this point, Janet decides to stand by her man after
all, and she virtually won't leave his bedside no more. Then she learns
from an anthropologist (Louis Mahoney) that the curse can only be lifted
if Stacey kills the man who cursed him ... and thus, the weakened Stacey
goes back to Africa on a manhunt, and soon he has decimated the Simbaza
tribe by the dozen ... only the man who cursed him is not among the dead,
and Stacey has already run out of bullets. Finally though, Stacey uses his
Jeep as an offensive weapon against exactly that man, and bingo, the
Simbaza's run over, the white man is saved.
This is actually a pretty poor picture: To cut costs, the entire film -
including the jungle scenes but excluding the stock footage, naturally -
was filmed in Great Britain, and it shows: The British countryside,
idyllic as it may seem, is a poor substitute for the African jungle. To
cut costs even more, several unnecessary scenes are padded out beyond
belief, like an airplane taking off, a weak nightclub act featuring Beryl
Cunningham, a walk through the park when Stacey hears the lion roars
(which could have been a very creepy scene was it not for an uninteresting
direction and an inappropriate musical score), and the like.
The main problem of the film though is with the script itself: The main
character, Stacey is a rather unlikeable racist and arrogant drunkard, who
ultimately doesn't even refrain from genocide just to lose his
hallucinations - actually there are points in this film where one can't
help but thinking his fate served him right. Then there's the whole
unnecessary subplot about his estranged wife which hardly brings the story
along and is not in the least interesting - and on top of that it makes
little sense that she comes back to him only after she has found out he is
a hallucinating drunkard. And then of course there's the fact that the
shocks of the film are highly repetitious after a while: When Stacey first
sees the Simbaza in London, that is kind of creepy, but after the third or
fourth time the only reaction these scenes genreate are "oh, him
again", especially since the Simbaza doesn't really do anything
menacing ...
That all said, Curse of the Voodoo is not (quite) as bad as it
sounds, it has some endearing scenes (if endearing for all the wrong
reasons) like the above-mentioned scene where Stacey is hunted through a
London Park by the tribesmen, or when he pursues a Simbaza tribesman (in
coat, hat and warpaint) through half of London, on a bus. And then there's
of course the attempt to pass off an English forest as the African jungle
... one can't help but admire this bold attempt. Of course, neither of
this is enough to make the film good, in the true sense of the word ...
but it makes it fun to watch nevertheless.
|