Before the WNUF Halloween Special (2013), Call Girl of Cthulhu (2014), and What Happens Next Will Scare You (2020), writer/director Chris LaMartina helmed a few other flicks, including shorts and feature films. The 2010 slasher flick, President’s Day, has just found a new life thanks to the recent Blu-ray release via the Terror Vision label, and we will take a look at that next week. However, today, we are checking out a quirky horror comedy from 2011, which mashes up craft beer, wicked witches, and sinister curses.
When he isn’t tending to his abusive dad’s (Lee Armstrong) requests for meals and liquor, Jeff Ducker (Chris Magorian) is trying to get his life together and realize his dream. Teamed up with his best buddy Preston Oakley (Gary-Kayi Fletcher), he is a craft beer brewer and half the team responsible for local favorite Slacker Lager. With a fresh batch ready for delivery, he and Preston are set to make their rounds. But when a black cat appears in the road ahead of them, superstitious Jeff freaks out and tries to grab the wheel from skeptical Preston to avoid the thing. Sadly, his efforts are responsible for hitting the critter.
They discover the mashed critter is wearing a collar, which leads to a creepy house over on lonesome and spooky Ambrose Road. Being the good guys they are, the two pack up the cat, bring its carcass home, and offer the woman who answers the door an apology and an offer of free beer. Little do they realize they’ve just offended a coven of actual witches. In a fit of rage, the coven’s leader Brynn (Helenmary Ball) curses their batch of beer, promising that liver damage will be the last concern for anyone who drinks it.
Freaked out even more by this, Jeff convinces his buddy to seek out the help of his Wiccan ex-girlfriend Zoe Lambros (Megan Therese Rippey) to pick her brain about how to undo this. She offers to help them out by talking to the witch who cursed them, and Jeff accompanies her. Ever skeptical Preston decides to make the deliveries anyway, and that’s when trouble starts.
Soon enough, all hell starts to break loose at local hot sports where the beer is popular: beer drinkers at a liquor store, a lounge, a frat party, and a bar will all discover new and strange ways to die when they drink the bedeviled beer.
Meanwhile, the coven needs not only victims for tonight’s sacrifice but a new body for their dead member—that black cat was actually a transformed witch looking for some special ingredients for a big old autumnal ritual—and this Wiccan chick on their doorstep looks like a decent candidate …
Can Jeff convince his fellows about what is happening before lives are lost? Will Zoe escape the witch’s clutches before she’s turned into a vessel for a dead witch’s spirit? Will Preston’s skepticism survive contact with werewolves, rotting corpses, and other victims of the curse? Can they convince police officer Rebecca Harrington (Kendra North), bartender Bruce Bartolli (Ryan Scott Thomas), or liquor store owner Jim Winston (Paul Fahrenkopf) about what is happening and enlist their aid? Chris LaMartina writes and directs a smorgasbord of fright and FX with the oddball grossout horror-comedy, Witch’s Brew (2011).
Perhaps my personal bar was set a little too high after seeing LaMartina’s subsequent films, but it took a bit of time to find the joy in coming to Witch’s Brew after the later flicks. It’s a film that has personality and a good sense for incorporating some gruesome effects into its run time, and the story itself is as ambitious as material LaMartina would come to later, but the film is a different beast than subsequent offerings.
While my synopsis focuses in on Jeff and Preston, the film does not actually kick off with them.
Instead, the picture opens with a prologue of sorts, showcasing the threat. A witch (Seregon O’Dassey) buys lemonade from a kid for a dollar, only to discover it’s a precursor to the batch served to Holly Hunter’s Senator June Finch in Superman v Batman: Dawn of Justice (2016). Her revenge? She and her coven surround the snotnosed brat and use their witchcraft to exact a melty kind of justice. It’s unexpectedly meanspirited, seeing these jeering responses to a kid’s suffering in the film’s first few minutes. However, it sets the stakes nicely, and gives us a proper foreshadowing glimpse of the goopy, practical effect dooms to come.
The team responsible for the gross outs have no small talent for giving us visually interesting stuff. It’s low or micro budget territory, and no one has Tom Savini’s genius for creativity on a shoestring. Though some of the efforts are noteworthy both for the heights and lows they simultaneously achieve (a werewolf transformation is laughable yet somehow also nightmarish), there are nevertheless plenty of creative ways for characters to snuff it. The makeup and effects teams give gorehounds plenty to enjoy.
For better or worse, the movie is populated with a lot of jackasses who deserve what’s coming their way. A liquor store owner who pops a cap off a beer, takes a chug, replaces the contents from his cup of water, and then press fits the cap back on? Jerk. A photographer who’s looking to take advantage of his model once she’s drunk enough? Ugh. Frat boys going that extra mile of gross in search of a little peek at boobs or the promise of inebriated sexual Olympics? Yeesh.
The characters tend toward the loathsome, but they are played well. There’s a mix of talent and experience here. While not everyone is especially convincing, they all aim for entertaining and deliver on it.
There are some familiar faces that would appear in LaMartina’s subsequent productions. He works with a cadre of actors who seem to get what the director is looking for, have an affinity for delivering the dialogue he writes, and (in the very least) to have some fun with the material. Helenmary Ball, in particular, is a crueler flipside to the one eyed academic she would play in Call Girl of Cthulhu.
Special mention to Ryan Scott Thomas and Megan Therese Rippey who manage to steal the scenes they appear in. And there’s much delight to be found in the coven itself, with Ball as the crone leader, a pipe playing maiden Piper (Lauren Lakis) verbally sparring with Hazel (Virginia House), and O’Dassey’s early appearances.
A browse through the credits either at the end of the film or over on IMDB shows people wearing many hats. This is a production that feels like a passion project, and while LaMartina’s name would be attached to bigger and better pictures later on, it’s due in no small part to early flicks like this, which provide ample opportunity to figure out what works, what doesn’t, how to assemble an entertaining flick and more.
The Blu-ray release is not loaded down with goodies and features. LaMartina provides a commentary track, a behind the scenes featurette, the trailer and teaser. The most enjoyable offering is the Witch’s Brew Drinking Game, which includes LaMartina explaining when to drink (and how much to imbibe), while producer and actor Jimmy George slowly deteriorates beside him. It’s clever and silly and the perfect accompaniment to the flick.
In the final analysis, Witch’s Brew is not quite my preferred pint of cinematic beer. The limited number of characters to sympathize with as opposed to the vast numbers of potential victims who deserve what’s coming to them is like too much Cascade hops in an IPA, too bitter for me. Still, the imagination for mayhem on the limited budget is surprising, as is the large cast of characters. There is food for deeper consideration here, including a commentary about the inability for many men and women to actually communicate with one another as well as an unflinching look at the way dudebros tend to throw misogynistic comments into their everyday interactions, both of which might provide some fruitful explorations for academics intrigued by sexual politics in the early twenty-first century. However, the film aims for a kind of party horror atmosphere, where a large cast of asshat characters indulge their ids and wind up paying the price. It’s a fun flick for those in the proper spirit (or imbibing the proper spirits), but viewers looking for something a little deeper in their horror films will find this brew a tad Lite.
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Witch’s Brew is available in a DVD edition. I got a copy of the Blu-ray directly from Jimmy George, who is available on various social media platforms.
Next, we will take a look at a picture that finds a young woman inheriting a pub and the curse that comes with it. Baghead is currently showing on the Shudder streaming service and is available in a VOD editions. DVD and Blu-ray are not available yet. But the very moody and cool soundtrack from Suvi-Eeva Äikäs is.
Writing for “Helluva Craft: Witch’s Brew (2011)” is copyright © 2024 by Daniel R. Robichaud.
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