Two undeniable forces in the manufacturing of cheese, Corey Feldman and A-Pix "Entertainment", combine their unholy powers of bad cinema to create the 90 minute equivalent to a huge pot of bubbling fondue madness... then throw it upon us, the unsuspecting viewers, in an attempt to rend the fleshy, unwashed meat from our very bones, forever serving as a reminder of why we're not to trust A-Pix and their schemes to conquer mankind through unwatchable tripe. Well, lucky for me I happen to be wearing my anti-dairy Zoot suit, and I'm ready for all the Voodoo these hacks of the black movie arts dare throw at me! Is this an all too harsh criticism? Well, I've seen the movie before, but when I saw it, it was during another H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. Weekend Extravaganza, and after you've denied yourself sleep and proper nourishment for something like 47 hours, things start to be a lot more entertaining that previously thought... in other words, I would've given 4 stars to a centipede crawling on the ceiling or a pill bug Jim accidentally popped in his mouth after mistaking it for a scaly M&M. But now, I'm ready, so bring on the frat zombie voodoo hijinx, cuz I'm loaded to the brim with alcohol and prescription medication I stole from my elderly neighbor's trash! Wooooooooo!

Andy Chadway (Feldman in all his post-80s humility) is the newest sideburned slacker transfer at Wales College, with intentions of being a writer... not an actor as a security guard at the campus immediately guesses of him... *groan*. The main reason for Andrew's transfer? Well, it's not because of the affordable on campus housing or the week old stew meat served in the cafeteria or the college's fine African studies course or even because it's the Girls Gone Wild campus, but because his little girlfriend Rebecca is majoring there, and he thought this would be a great chance to get on her nerves everyday with his intolerable Corey Feldman qualities. We can see why it's understandable she's not too thrilled when he surprises her with the news... Seriously though I can't see what her big problem is with her man's big decision. After all, if she gives a shit about him as a potential lifemate, then wouldn't she be glad to see him there instead of wasting away in the UK? Maybe she's just intending to marry him for his money when he becomes rich and didn't have to fear him cheating on her over there. After all, have you SEEN the kind of horses they breed across the pond?! Mr. Ed would rather mount a wood chipper than stud with those beasts! Anyway, Becky's obviously unappreciative attitude isn't the only prob young Andy's got on his hands, cuz it seems he was planning on bunking with his women while in class. This is impossible though, as she lives in a sorority and doesn't want to risk her status by sneaking in a "man" every night. So, Andy's got a shelter prob now to go along with his frigid broad and his "new victim in town" status... and somehow, I'm not feeling any sympathy when I remember it's Corey Feldman.

When he disagrees with local frat house etiquette, thereby forfeiting his last resort, leaving him homeless and sleeping on somebody's lawn. But, when he's confronted by the lawn's drunken jock owners, Andy's saved by his new best friend, the mysterious geek in the black trenchcoat, Casian Marsh, who offers sanctuary for the downtrodden freshmen of Wales. Saving him from the jocks (and stealing their goat mascot for good measure), Marsh takes Andy back to his nerd stronghold, Xanadu, Dungeons & Dragons central of Wales and home to the majority of the AV student body. Ah Xanadu, where the nerdanites shuffle about flexing their knowledge of useless historical trivia and dick slap you across the nose with their vocabulary of 9 syllable words. Ever wonder about the history behind the everyday handshake? Well, sit in Xanadu's cursed walls for 3 minutes and you'll know more than you ever wanted to about this topic and thousands of other questions no one asked. Anyway, to cut to the chase, one of Xanadu's members has recently "taken leave" (i.e. Casian killed him with a voodoo doll in the opening sequence... leave it to A-Pix to give away the entire movie in the first 5 minutes) and Casian would like to extend the offer of membership to fill their quota to none other than Andy, who takes it up without a second thought, just as you'd expect, unaffected by the awkward actions of his new frat brothers or the all around atmosphere of "Zoinks Scooby, something's fucked up right here!". Word to the wise, the phrase "any port in a storm" isn't necessarily a good personal creed to stand by.

Membership into the mystical realm of Xanadu (where the water AND trash pick-up are included in the rent!) doesn't come without a cost though, as Andy is chosen to break into the Wales medical building and exhume a corpse from the cadaver storage room, with the help of a couple of his new "brothers", Night Of The Creeps style. Living with a bunch of charisma-less college nerd zombies isn't the only problem with Andy's new digs though, as he soon finds out when an old guy in a trenchcoat starts to harass him, practically attacking him on campus and hanging around the nerdhole's front lawn. Is he really crazy though, or does he really just like that tree across the street? But of course, from the abject (and badly done) look of horror on his face, we all know he's not just talking out of his ass when giving warnings that Andy must leave before it's too late. Hey, look back in your history of horror movies and you'll of course find that the town nutjob ALWAYS knows what the real evil going around is, and you should ALWAYS listen to their seemingly nonsensical ramblings! Don't believe me? Well, when you're impaled on a broomstick or find your head crushed under a humorous drive though ordering speaker statue of Mayor McCheese and your last thoughts will be, "why didn't I listen to that quadriplegic wino tugging on my pant leg with his teeth everyday for the past 6 years when I had the chance?!", don't say you never had fair warning from your old pal Anubis, cuz I'll be too busy reaping your very soul from your mangled body to give a shit.

After a night of the homoerotic Freudian nightmares that are typical of Corey Feldman's dreamscape, Andy confronts Rachel about them, before being molested by the crazy old guy, who latches onto him on the campus and tears open young Andy's shirt, then mumbles something about how he "doesn't bare the mark" before scurrying away from advancing campus security. Again, too much info from the opening scene, as the recently deceased former member of Xanadu was attempting to carve a voodoo tattoo of a snake and one of those House Of Blues burning hearts off of his chest... obviously that's the "mark" the disheveled man who knows more than anyone thinks was talking about... and obviously Andy's gonna wind up with one of said inkings on his body... let's just hope it's not on his ass. Instead of going into great detail about the rest of our movie, I'll sum it up in short for anyone with A.D.D. who would otherwise be unable to follow an extensive review... oh, potheads and people with frequent blackouts may find this helpful too. Okay, sure enough, Andy's frat buddies get him completely trashed out of his mind one night at their local Satanist bar. Drugging his brew, the villains carry him to the basement of the establishment, where they proceed to strip off his shirt, tweak his nipples and resurrect the cadaverous babe he stole from the medical facility, so that she may give Andy hi, yes, you guessed it, his My Little Pony tattoo... that's obviously a joke, as Corey Feldman, as we all know, was more of a Rainbow Bright kinda guy. So, he winds up getting the evil tat and is now part of Casian's sinister plot to sacrifice Andy and the other Xanadudians to make himself immortal and all powerful. However, timely intervention by the old guy (whose son is one of Casian's mindless zombie slave boys) saves Andy, and before his undead son kills him, he passes on the secret to destroying Casian to Andy. After discovering that everyone from the cops to the teachers to random faces in the crowd are all in on the cult, Andy, with the help of Rachel (whom the frat corpses took time out of playing Star Wars Stratego and writing e-mail to Leonard Nemoy to capture), manages to defeat Casian with his own voodoo tricks, impaling him on a lead pipe covered in anti-evil voodoo powder... despite the fact Andy has little or no knowledge in the darkest magicks from the blackest heart of Africa... that, or voodoo has been made so simple, that Andy was able to find a copy of "Voodoo For Dummies" in the library. Hey, it's A-Pix, what do you expect?

Though the storyline was as transparent as the plastic wrap I mummify myself within before swimming in a vat of chocolate pudding and vodka on my off days (remember, we all have different ways of dealing with stress), the acting was pale, the direction was bland and Corey Feldman is just one big punch line, there were a couple of redeemable moments to the film. One of these was the scene in which Casian puts on his own episode of "Twisted Mego Theater" and shows the local jocks why it's not a good idea to bust up frat houses that belong to aspiring voodoo priests, by using that voodoo that he do to possess the head of the household and sends him on a shotgun-a-thon, pumping holes into his frat brothers and a random skank he woke up next to, then ending it all with his own lead sandwich on the front lawn. Fun for all who claim people who play and enjoy sports a little too much as their nemesi, though those types themselves will probably be too busy high fiving each other and molesting, errr "patting" each others' asses over the topless blond between the gun toting frat man's sheets. Also, though I hate the guy and laugh at him consistently when I see his face or hear his name mentioned in any aspect, you have to envy Corey Feldman, because as Andy he gets to assault two cops: one smashed in the head under the good of his car and the other getting his hair parted and his brain scrambled with a bottle o' booze. Other than these two elements, there's really not much to enjoy. There's plenty to tolerate just for the sake of watching a cheap horror flick, and more than enough to groan and cringe at (which I'll gladly nit-pick and MST3K on in the next paragraph(s)), but very little that I could really label as "entertaining" in any shape or form.

First things first: the student body at good ol' Wales College are obviously not there for the purpose of higher learning, or they are and they have total tunnel vision on their studies, as at least two scenes show this in spades. First, the frat house massacre. The man with the gun aced something like 4 people before doing himself in. After blowing away his girlfriend, he went directly across the hallway to blow a load in his nearest frat brother... and yes, I know how sick that sounds, but that's not the point. The point I'm trying to make, is that NO ONE in the entire house heard those shotgun blasts, as they were caught completely by surprise when what's-his-name appeared before them and started shooting. Not even the guy downstairs with the headphones on could've missed those ear splitting boomstick cracks, and yet everybody somehow managed to overlook them... My second argument comes from the scene after Andy discovers his new friends really are zombies. As the goons chase him across the campus, we notice there are numerous students littering the campus, none of which even seem to notice Andy being stalked nor the voodoo exchange with Casian that plays out in the open public. Though this is probably just bad direction and storytelling (like the rest of the movie), I'd like to think that the campus on which the movie was shot was in the middle of mid-terms or some such scholastic highlight of the semester, and the faculty and students refused to give up the school for the movie, allowing the cast to only shoot during classes and extra quiet so as to not disturb anyone. In other words, I think they had the same problem the cast of Bloody Murder had with the summer camp they were shooting at: working around the most unpredictable of nature's many wraths: human clutter.

And now, a closing free tip for budding filmmakers: don't use Voodoo as your archetype, because giving away the villain and all the supposedly suspenseful stuff in the beginning doesn't work as well as you'd think... though why you'd think it WOULD work is beyond me, and is a question I'd like to ask first time director René Eram while I'm stuffing my video copy of this movie up her ass... which reminds me, I gotta find my shoehorn before tomorrow. All in all, I guess Voodoo wasn't too bad in comparison to most movies I've subjected myself to. Hell, in comparison to the other releases of one A-Pix studios, Voodoo is the next Exorcist! Well, maybe Exorcist II... Anyway, I've got some dark voodoo herbs of my own to burn ("...power of the dark side Snoogans!") and I gotta go watch Bordello Of Blood. Hey, don't ask me, somehow arcane weeds inhaled through a twisted length of colored glass makes Feldman fun to watch! Now, bring on the bong...

Sequels: Nope

If You Liked This Flick, Check Out: Night Of The Creeps or Shreiker