I got a couple of first-time watches to hit yall with. One movie is actually around 10 years old, a found footage joint called Final Prayer (or Borderlands in the UK where it was made). I really don't know how I slept on it for so long, because I really liked it. The other is an Arrow movie called
Two Witches, which has good and bad elements but is worth peeping.
I'll start with
Two Witches since that's the one you're less likely to have seen.
1h 38m | 18
www.imdb.com
Expectant young mother Sarah is convinced she has been given the evil eye from a mysterious blank-eyed old hag while she is dining with her bullish and insensitive partner Simon. When the couple go to visit his new-agey friends Dustin and Melissa, dark forces are unleashed after an ill-advised attempt at consulting a Ouija board to allay her fears. Meanwhile, tensions grow between grad school student Rachel and her new roommate Masha after a violent incident involving a man that the strange and impulsive young woman has brought home.
Notes:
On the good side, this feels like Indy horror done right. You can tell there were constraints in the budget, so there's a bit of fast editing to avoid having to show us too much. But the director puts in work. There are some incredible shots and individual frames that are just plain freaky. While the actresses' and actors' performances are uneven, the leads do really well, particularly the girl who plays Masha. The movie doesn't really kick into gear until Masha's creepiness enters, and she kinda steals it.
Plotwise, this thing almost feels like it was meant to be an anthology. The narrative is linear, but it skips from one group of characters to a new set in ways that feel disjointed. But it does enough to connect things by the end that it all works (sort of). The beauty of the jumping around is that they basically said "screw all the midpoints, let's just go from scare to scare" so that you're never waiting too long for things to pick up or get creepy.
On the downside, the Masha plotline doesn't begin until close to halfway through. The weaker story starts things off a bit slow. I mentioned the plot feeling disjointed, and that never goes away. Until the post-credit scenes, I still didn't really piece everything together. It makes just enough sense not to break immersion, but they cut it close. I'd say the directing >>> the writing. This is Indy too, so while there's some solid gore and scares, the effects are mid at some keypoints (one scene at the end that's played up for drama wound up making me laugh out loud).
But, with slim options lately...this was good enough to throw on and give a shot. For top-notch witch horror, I'd go with Hellbringer instead. But Two Witches falls firmly in my "not bad" range.