Monday, September 12, 2005

0003: MoviePhile 01: The Skeleton Key
Let me start by saying that I rate movies somewhere within three ratings: Good, Fair, and Poor... more specifically: "Buy it," "Rent it," and "Murder it, I have banners for each. :) Oh, THIS POST, ALONG WITH ANY OTHER MOVIEPHILE POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS!!!

I saw this movie a few weeks ago with my mom... Hey, if it wasn't for her, I wouldn't even have seen this movie. I saw it at the Palladium Theater that's within walking distance to my house for the the matinee price of four bux.

It was worth every penny, and then some. I wouldn't mind spending full price to see this movie again, in fact, I did.

This movie deals with the practices and beliefs of hoodoo. In short, it's an African religion based off of sacrifices. This makes the movie cool, because it teaches you something while scaring the shit out of you. Boy was this movie scary, this was one of the first times that I actually got scared from a movie and was actually dreading what was to come next.

I'll spare you the character's name, I don't remember them. The main character, I'll refer to her as Blondie from now on, worked at a hosipital and quit after seeing what they do to people's records after they die. Blondie's searching for jobs, and she finds this article asking for a maid. She goes, and meets an old woman, her husband, who has a stroke, and their banker, who comes around the house to check on them. Blondie's job is to take care of the old dude with the stroke.

As the movie progresses, you learn of a story about the original owner of the house. Basically, he had a lot of slaves, and two of them were a couple of people who practiced hoodoo. The owner has a party, and leaves the slaves to look after the kids. The kids go play hoodoo with the slaves and dissappear. The partygoers begin to wonder where the kids were, and they all die, I don't remember... someone gets hanged... I don't know, the point is, the slaves dissappear into ambiguity, and everyone else dies or something.

The slaves didn't die, they used hoodoo to take the bodies of a male and a female and continued their lives as normal. Every time they began to get old, they'd use the newspaper to get a person to watch over the person who conveiniently got a stroke (the person they stole the body from). This trap passes down to Blondie.

Blondie slowly discovers things about the culture and begins to believe it little by little, which give the hoodoo magic power over her. It ends up being her downfall, as she loses in the end and she ends up in the old woman's body, while the old woman's body has taken her's. Her husband is the banker, who had taken his body from the old guy with the stroke. Confusing right? Explaining this movie is like solving a knot, all the better, you should go see it. I loved this movie, you will too.


(when it comes out)
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