I discovered 2 movies on my “to see” list that star cutie Aaron Dominguez, so it was the perfect opportunity for a delicious double feature.
WITCHBOARD (2024)
This is the way I prefer my remakes lately. Take the skeleton of the original plot and add more meat. In this case, the simple plot of a woman getting possessed and going psycho after using a witchboard is there, but there’s also a rich backstory here involving the witch trials. I love me a movie with a good witch. However, the backstory flashbacks get a bit excessive, causing the film to run unnecessarily long at 112 minutes.
After an opening establishing that the board once belonged to a witch executed in the 1600s, we fast forward to the present. A mad cult leader sends his minions out to find the board after it is stolen from a museum.
The board ends up in the woods near the home of the sexy subject of this post: Aaron Dominguez. His wife finds it and brings it inside—after getting a pussy scare. Seriously, they defaulted to the cat jump scare trope in the woods. However, this devious cat becomes an integral part of the horror. This isn’t your Hocus Pocus variety bewitched cat. This meat-eater totally reminded me of the cat from the Pet Sematary remake.
The couple is opening a bistro, so they have a tasting party with friends. They use the board, and soon the wife begins acting different.
There are some pretty gory and frighteningly fun moments throughout the movie as the witch steps up her game while possessing the wife, but again, the numerous scenes filling in the backstory really hurt the pacing, particularly because the witch trial subplot is as basic as it gets.
The money shot is definitely during the opening night of the restaurant, when the wife casts a spell on the food that causes all the diners to go batshit crazy and start attacking each other. On top of that, the witch is perfectly witchy. As a bonus, we get a cheesy, old school final frame scare.
HIVE (2026)
This Tubi original definitely gets points for delivering on super scary killer children horror with some fantastic visuals. It reminds me of a cross between Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Playground” and Stephen King’s “Children of the Corn”.
It also feels like it’s almost trying to be a metaphor for a Latin community that has been heavily gentrified and essentially “eaten up” by white people, but it never quite clarifies that concept. I wasn’t sure if the white people had moved in, taken over, built up the houses, and hired Spanish people to work for them, or if the white people had always been there and began renovating their homes and hiring Spanish people to do the work they don’t want to. Either way, there definitively is a socioeconomic message about whites and Spanish people for sure.
Our main girl is a teenager who takes a babysitting job. Aaron plays her blue collar brother. And there’s another older lady housekeeper who tries to warn them to get the hell out of town.
Unfortunately, the main girl shows up for her job. The little white girl she’s watching convinces her to go to the playground…a playground where there are only children, no adults. This is a great introduction to their freakiness, with them in a choreographed dance doing the old jerky movements and spider crawl. Eek!
There’s a very isolating atmosphere, and there are no adults around anywhere, let alone the playground. The sister and brother eventually team up with the housekeeper and discover a sort of ant colony of these infected children underground. Yikes!
If there’s one problem with the movie, it’s that it gets a little too complicated for its own good and begins to slow in pace for a while as a result. Not to mention, the sister and brother have every damn chance to just get the fuck away from the town, but they don’t.
The final confrontation in the playground is another banger of a sequence, and we don’t get the kind of trendy gloom and doom conclusion we see in so many movies these days. The cherry on top is that the main weapon to use against these kids is a tank of soda and syrup. Awesome.
