Witch Hunt (1994)
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 40m (it felt longer), rated at 5.5 by 1,800 (drug-addled) cinematizens.
Genre: Noir fantasy.
DNA: Hollywood.
Verdict: Skip it.
Tagline: The tortoise outpaced it.
Intended as a sequel to Cast a Deadly Spell it suffices to demonstrate the superiority of that film to this one. Yikes.
This was watching cement dry, and wishing a dog would run through it to break up the monotony.
The original pitch idea would have been interesting but the execution was execrable. What idea? Set in early 1950s Hollywood the unscrupulous Senator Joseph McCarthy campaigns against, not communism in La La Land, but magic. (See Cast a Deadly Spell.) He is so unscrupulous that he plans to burn witches alive at his campaign rallies. (That might have seemed far fetched in 1994, but it is now all too easy to imagine this will appeal to the planners of the next Republican convention.)
I won’t labour the threadbare production values. The non-sequiturs. The dead ends. I will mention that a dead bored Dennis Hopper mouths his lines in a monotone, with frequent glances at his watch.
There were some good moments, but too few for redemption. The late Julian Sand as the Irish villain was a delight, perfectly polite and never threatening, yet menacing all the same. Hypolyta Kropokin was a dignified witch who seemed to forget her hexography at the crucial moment. And the female lead had a poignant backstory that emerged at the end, without any fit to the plot, such as it was, in which she got to act. There was also a corker of a special effect at the Drive-In Theatre. In short, it has moments, but these dots did not connect up into a whole.