#111 -- Wake the Witch (2010)

Director: Dorothy Booraem
Rating: 3/5

A young girl, Deb, is out in the woods taking pictures of her friends--Trixie and Karen--for a photography assignment. They find some weird chains buried in the ground, and Trixie and Karen remember a story they knew when they were children. Way back, there was a woman accused of being a witch; the townspeople took her out into the woods, hanged her, and buried chains all over to keep her underground. It was said that if you follow the chains to the tree where she was hanged, walk around it three times and kiss your left hand, the witch will wake up and tell you your fortune. Trixie decides to try it out, even though there actually is no tree at all (she guesses that there was a tree there, but it moved somehow). Nothing happens, so they return home. Shortly afterward, though, strange things do begin to happen, the first of which is Deb's brother Mark getting really sick and acting weird. Deb notices that he's spending an awful lot of time out in the woods, so she decides to follow him, with the help of Trixie and Karen. On this trip, Trixie passes out and has a seizure, landing her in the hospital for the rest of the movie. The next time Deb decides to follow Mark, she brings only Karen--and Karen is kidnapped by a bunch of zombie-looking guys in hoodies.



She gets further help from Mark's roommate Brent, and they try to figure out what is going on together. It turns out that, back when the witch was a live, there was an epidemic around town, one much like what is happening to everyone Deb knows. I guess that has something to do with the witch, though it never really elaborates. Brent decides to check the supermarket to see if anything's going on over there (or maybe he was just hungry), and Deb sneaks off into the woods one last time. She goes down into a very large cavernous room and finds Mark there, with the corpse of the witch, trying to wake her. There's a hole in the wall that looks sort of like a portal into another dimension, and it is through this hole that the hoodie-wearing-zombies emerge. The zombie-guys drag Mark into the portal, and Deb must figure out how to get out of the tomb alive.

And she doesn't, really; I don't think. The ending made absolutely no sense to me at all. The rest of the movie was okay. It took a while for anything interesting to really happen, but that was okay. There was great character development with Deb, and I grew to really like her. Mark too, but that's just because he was a cutie pie. That is the main reason this movie kept my attention (the character of Deb, not her hot brother). I think it's a pretty good story, but it just didn't live up to its potential. Maybe if the writers had given a little more explanation of everything that was happening, it would have been better. Overall, it was decent but not amazing.