Spell (2020) was a valiant effort from Mark Tonderai that ultimately fell flat

 

It was a valiant effort from Mark Tonderai, but ultimately fell short (Image courtesy of impawards.com)

Mark Tonderai's one of those directors that flies under the radar with lukewarm shows and colder movies (aside from Twelve Monkeys). Generally emerging once every few years with a studio-backed movie, Tonderai manages to just barely keep his head above the water with many of his projects. Add Spell to his wiki list of movies that fail to deliver and you've got a spiderweb-lined cupboard full of disappointment. 

Spell is about Marquis, a prominent lawyer in the big city that flies his family to Kansas for the wake of his late father. While traveling there, their plane is caught in a thunderstorm and crashes. When he wakes up, he's in the home of a family of black hillbillies that practice hoodoo (voodoo is the religion, hoodoo is the magic). Unbeknownst to him, they're keeping him there for nefarious reasons to benefit themselves. 

Spell is just a jumble of confusion leading to a gumbo pot of chaos story telling (image courtesy of rogerebert.com)

Spell stars Omari Hardwick (The Guardian, Gridiron Gang), Loretta Devine (Grey's Anatomy and many more) and John Beasley (Walking Tall). This movie was also produced by Morris Chestnut (Boyz n the Hood), we presume for the hoodoo elements in the movie, although how much hoodoo would a guy called Morris Chestnut know, right. Dun Dun Dun. (Unbeknownst to us...)

The pacing for the movie was sporadic, the camera angles are typical Tonderai which leave you guessing his intentions with how he visually lines up a shot for storytelling purposes, and not in a good way and the script was dubious at best. 

For a supernatural horror thriller, it was definitely thriller without the horror. There were little to no scenes depicting horror save for the hoodoo elements and the general confusion Marquis was constantly in. 

The only thing we liked about the movie was the hoodoo. There's rich lore surrounding the practice of hoodoo and they weren't necessarily explained well in this movie, but to watch them be presented a bit more in-depth compared to movies like The Skeleton Key was very much appreciated. 

Dolls nailed to a tree is always a good sign (Image courtesy of digitalspy.com)

We're not going to touch on the aspect that it's an all black movie with African heritage bla bla bla. It's a movie with a very interesting premise. Race, color, creed or religion shouldn't matter. 

All in all, there were more cons than pros for this movie and we expected more from such a compelling premise, but ultimately, Asian Does Horror gives Spell 👻👻 ghost emojis out of five.