Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Well it’s Saturday Night which means it’s the Most Dangerous Night on Television. I guess. I don’t know if the Sci-Fi Channel still uses that promo phrase since the name change, a change I still refuse to recognize if for no other reason than I’m down with anarchy. Today we’re watching my main man Luke Goss in the sword and sorcery fantasy joint Witchville… and one day I’m going to stop setting my DVR to capture this stuff. One day.

There’s trouble in the kingdom of… heck… I don’t know what they called this place. Anyway grand knight Eric (Andrew Pleavin) has been dispatched to retrieve wayward prodigal son Prince Malichy (Goss) who is yukking it up at the pub with his best buddy and Erik’s warrior brother Jason (Ed Speelers). It seems that Malichy’s old man is dying and needs his son by his side to properly pass the throne but alas they are too late as the King has passed and Malachy sees first hand the destruction that has befallen his land.

What has happened to this land of… someplace? For that we will need to heed the words of magician and witch hunter Kramer (Simon Thorp) who has informed the King that witches are the source of the woe that has befallen his land. Sounds crazy, at least that is until they find one and burn it to death, which as we know is how we deal with witches, but alas this course of action comes with some dire consequences. Now Malachy and his troops, which basically consist of Erik and Jason, have to find the evil witches and root them out.

But not so fast my friends because this coven of witches is ruled by the extremely powerful and extremely evil Red Queen (Sarah Douglas) and her crazy hot kung fu enabled daughter Jozefa (MyAnna Buring). Even though the Queen doesn’t show babygirl a lot of love. The Queen is not very happy because Kramer the Witch Hunter has a sacred book that belongs to them. We don’t know why she needs this book back

so bad since it does nobody any good except other witches and the Red Queen seems to have the book memorized but we’ll roll with it. So the queen wants the book back and she wants all of Malchy’s men dead. Except for Malachy himself who she has big plans for. Hmmm…

Well King Malachy, his loyal knights, and the hot Asian chicks he picked up along the way… it’s complicated… will defend this kingdom of Somewhere against the Red Queen to the death. Literally. Because something is written in that book that I really don’t understand and it’s kind of important.

Directed by Pearry Reginald Teo, whose last film I saw was the confusing but somewhat entertaining cyberpunk flick ‘The Gene Generation’, we have another confusing but far less entertaining medieval tale with ‘Witchville’. Aside from the fact that a lot of this movie just didn’t make much sense to me since it had a narrative that seemed to be ‘winging it’, it also suffered from the fact this was an epic type tale that lacked and kind of epicness. I realize that there are dollar considerations when doing this kind of thing but at any given time maybe this king of ours should have more than four lousy nights by his side. Plus the hot Asian chicks killed half of the knights anyway and we now have to beg the hot Asian chicks to be our knights now. I love hot kung fu enabled Asian chicks as much as the next guy but I really would like to know why they are roaming the land in Witchville slicing people up on the side of the road.

It also didn’t help that the special effects were pretty shoddy, though we are on record stating we’d rather see bad special effects than no special effects, and while we are big fans of Luke Goss here at the FCU… there’s not a lot about Mr. Goss that reeks ‘Medieval King’. Richard Gere even thinks Luke Goss makes for a suspect Medieval King. Outside of that the acting in this movie is pretty good. The first half of the movie which centers around the witch ‘quest’ is pretty boring, but by the time they turned the movie over Sarah Douglas, because nobody can do bad quite as good as Ursa can do bad, the movie did get a lot better. I don’t know if I would call it good… but it became tolerable.

This next part is a tiny spoiler… actual it’s a HUGE SPOILER even though most will figure it out halfway through but it turns out that like Darth Vader, the Red Queen is Malachy’s mom and like Leia, Jozefa is his twin sister. The thing about that is that actress MyAnna Buring looks like she’s around twenty two and Luke Goss looks like he’s about forty five. Plus she’s the older twin. There’s nothing ‘twin-like’ there. I know my man has been drinking and whoring the last few years but dang. Also like Star Wars the Red Queen needs Malachy to come to the dark side which will make them all-powerful which led to the twins killing themselves or something which was necessary so they could kill their mother. I guess. I have no idea what was going on there because they were both alive in the next scene rattling on about some nonsense. Beats me.

So what we have with ‘Witchville’ is a medieval epic that wasn’t very epic, or all that medieval for that matter and didn’t have enough witch action in it to fill a ‘ville. It did have Sarah Douglas being bad, MyAnna Buring being cute while sporting a permanent mad-on and hot Asian chicks doing kung fu. Obviously that’s not all bad, it's just not enough.