Get Ready for Next Year's Witchboard Reboot With This Piece on the Awesomely Cheesy Original
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I have been covering Tawny Kitaen’s filmography more or less in chronological order so far but the kindly benefactor who commissioned ongoing series on the complete filmographies of Tawny Kitaen and Rebecca Gayheart series gave me permission to skip ahead a little in order to cover Scream 2 and Witchboard during the most spooktacular month of the year: October.
I happily took him up on his offer because I try to keep things as spookily scarifying as possible around Halloween. Besides, We Hate Movies, one of my very favorite bad movie podcasts, is covering Witchboard this month as well, so it’s safe to assume that there is a Hiroshima-level explosion of interest and excitement around this spectacularly silly motion picture.
We Hate Movies doesn’t just cover any old bad, failed movie. No, in order to be good fodder for the podcast, a movie has to be spectacularly, flamboyantly and distinctively terrible in a way that will stimulate conversation, wisecracking and podcast shenanigans.
In that respect, Kevin S. Tenney’s 1986 cult classic Witchboard is a perfect We Hate Movies selection because it is full of choices that are as bold as they are bizarre, starting with the decision to make a horror movie about a Parker Brothers board game.
Parker Brothers are the board game kings who brought the world such iconic staples of Americana as Monopoly, Sorry!, Risk and Trivial Pursuit. In Witchboard, Parker Brothers brings you those fun games as well but also death, bloodshed and multiple supernatural spirits, at least one of whom has a taste for bloodshed and has wracked up an impressive body count both during his lifetime and after it.
Witchboard is consequently a very curious exercise in product placement that makes one of Parker Brothers’ signature games seem both fun and exciting and a portal into a sinister world of ghosts, demonic possession and mass murder players may not survive.
The pleasingly perplexing choices continue with making its initial guide to the spirit world Brandon Sinclair (Stephen Nichols), a male model type with a seemingly impregnable helmet of blonde hair.
Jim (left) and Brandon (right)
Brandon Sinclair doesn’t just have the name of the yuppie bully in a ski resort themed 1980s sex comedy: he has the looks and sneering aristocratic air as well. If you look up “snob” in the dictionary you’ll find a picture of Brandon Sinclair yet in Witchboard he’s a jock college student with the soul of a teen witch who brings out a Ouija board at a college party and proceeds to tell us everything we need to know about its history, purpose and quirks.
From this exposition dump we learn that the spirits that come through the Ouija board don’t like vessels who have been drinking or using drugs and also that they’re terrible liars and abysmal spellers who should be addressed in groups of more than one or great evil might be unleashed
At that weird college party Brandon tells the guests about his distressingly involved relationship with a ten year old boy named David who died many decades earlier. Now there is something VERY creepy about adults who have intense friendships with children they are not related to or know through their parents. That’s the one reason Michael Jackson seemed a little off.
This goes double for ghost children. Brandon Sinclair establishes himself as one creepy motherfucker both through his encyclopedic knowledge of ouija boards and the fact that he just casually drops the fact that every once in a while he feels the need to check in with his ten year old ghost friend.
Linda Brewster (Tawny Kitaen), Brandon’s bombshell ex-girlfriend, is into experimenting with the Ouija board but her drunk boyfriend Jim (Todd Allen) is nowhere near as enthused, heckling, “Hey, I don’t talk to cardboard.”
Jim nearly pays for his impudence in being disrespectful to the spirit conjured up in a board game with his life.
Linda is excited but doesn’t know what to say to a dead 10 year old ghost. Here are some conversation starters I think might work:
“What’s it like being a ghost?”
“Whassup?"
“How’s your hammer hanging?” (Inappropriate)
“How bout them Cubbies?”
The next day we learn why there’s so much bad blood between Brandon and Jim when Jim tells comic relief buddy Lloyd (James W. Quinn) he’s working at a construction sight with about how he and Brandon used to be best friends as children and Brandon helped him deal with the trauma of having alcoholic parents and Jim even went to medical school briefly but dropped out and Brandon thinks Jim stole Linda from him.
Before Lloyd even has time to say, “Huh” to the avalanche of information he’s been inundated with, he dies in a mysterious construction accident. But was it really an accident or was it ghost murder? Meanwhile Linda very dangerously ignores Brandon’s wise words of experience and begins having regular chat sessions with David via the Ouija board.
Witchboard is inexplicably but fascinatingly much more invested in the complicated relationship between Brandon and Jim than in its ostensible romantic leads. Brandon and Jim have an unexpectedly rich arc that takes them from childhood friends to college arch-enemies to reluctant collaborators in trying to uncover the supernatural threat to a woman they both love and then finally to renewed friendship and possibly something more.
Brandon and Jim are refreshingly in touch with their emotions for dudes in a 1980s horror movie. Their shockingly deep and relentlessly homoerotic bond even ends with Jim holding Brandon’s dead body in his arms like a lover and weeping uncontrollably at the loss of someone dear to him.
Everything is too, too extra in Witchboard and I fucking love it. For example the deaths of people around Linda and Jim is investigated by a detective who does not have much to do, or much screen time, but what little dialogue he does have focusses perversely but wonderfully, on his love of magic and a series of belabored magic-themed metaphors, like when he tells Jim at Lloyd’s funeral, “You ever been to Vegas? They got these two guys there, Sigmund (sic) and Roy. I mean, they’re the best magicians I have ever seen, without a doubt. I mean they do some amazing things. You know there’s only one thing I like better than seeing a good magic trick. It’s trying to figure out how it was done.”
See, he’s not actually talking about magic, but rather about MURDER and how he wants to figure out how murders are committed, and by whom, which is good, since that’s pretty much the job description of a homicide cop.
At first Brandon suspects that David is so angry about having to compete for Linda’s attention that he unleashes a posthumous crime spree. An evil spirit begins possessing Linda more and more through a process called “progressive entrapment”, where a ghost increasingly comes to possess a host body until the possession is complete.
To deal with the evil spirits Brandon hires a kooky medium named Sarah "Zarabeth" Crawford (Kathleen Wilhoite). The wacky psychic is single-handedly keeping the spirit of New Wave and the Valley Girl movement alive through her wardrobe, vernacular and attitude. She’s a punishingly comic character in a horror movie full of incongruous comic elements that seldom, if ever, feels like a horror-comedy.
When it tries to be funny, Witchboard is mostly just weird and when it tries to be scary it’s unintentionally hilarious. This is, after all, a movie with the crowd-pleasing sight of the good guys shooting a possessed Ouija board full of holes with a gun until it’s dead.
By that point Linda’s possession is complete but it turns out she’s actually being inhabited by the vengeful spirit of an axe murderer, not a ten year old boy. That explains why the spirit seems more interested in murdering people with an axe than in playing video games or looking at girly magazines.
Kitaen has a spectacularly silly role here that involves a lot of heavy scenes where she’s acting opposite an invisible ghost through a Parker Brothers board game but the video vixen pulls off her character’s weird descent into supernatural evil as adeptly as she does the gratuitous shower scene where she must escape from an evil entity very interested in checking out her wet, unclothed form.
Is Witchboard a good movie? Oh god no. Is it scary? Not in the least. But it is weird and distinctive and thoroughly watchable and at this point in my journey through Kitaen’s complete filmography, that’s enough. Heck, it’s more than enough.
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