Voodoo is alive and fashionable in this novel, swank supernatural chiller! Engaging, to-the-point cinematography, Steven Severin's moody score, and a fresh, pensive story make London Voodoo an arty choice for the thinking horror patron. It's brooding, yet suspenseful, with good timing and a quick pace. This is writer/director Robert Patten's first of two independent feature efforts. Patten achieves a good balance between credible horror and reality that doesn't insult our intelligence.Business executive Lincoln Mathers (Doug Cockel) and his wife Sarah (Sara Stewart), move to a posh London town house. It's everything they could want. Quaint, chic, and historic, with a pair of century-old corpses in the basement. Of course, the moldy cadavers aren't a selling point. Sarah discovers them during renovations. That's normal for an old historic house, right? Except maybe for the eyes-rolled-up-in-the-back-of-her-head seizure Sarah endures when she tampers with them Buried with the bodies are oddball religious artifacts. Sarah's damned curious. Her latest hobby is local historical research, and she wants to solve the cadaver mystery. Doug is overwhelmed with a new high-salaried, 16 hour-a-day, executive position. He wants Sarah out of his hair so he leaves her to it.Makes sense.Sarah's hobby turns out to be ... well, consuming. The cellar dwellers aren't actually dead, they just smell that way. They're an evil Voodoo priestess and her lover, slain by her prior followers. The un-dead duo decide that existing in their decaying, de-animated bodies under the basement floor is a bit boring. The priestess condemns Sarah's sumptuous body for a soul transfer, and she's taking possession now! Before you can say, "that old black magic," Sarah's mere presence sours milk and rots fruit.. She finds deep joy in collecting bits of Doug's skin and hair. Sarah prowls the flat like a puma in heat. clad in BDSM lingerie, nipples erect, an obsessive, determined look in her eye. When Doug postpones sex to read a prospectus sent home by the boss, Sarah rips off the cover page, stuffs it between her legs, then crams it in his mouth while cursing in Creole.The friendly neighborhood Voodoo sect wants to help, but Doug dismisses them as crackpots. ( Not that they're any stranger than the way Sarah's been acting.) Doug's too distracted with his soul sucking finance job to do more than write off Sarah's shenanigans as a midlife crisis. But as Sarah transforms into an undulating, deviant, sexually insatiable vixen, family politics grow awkward.That local Voodoo cult has a solution, if Doug will only listen. It's not a pleasant treatment option to say the least, but Doug had better wise up because the Voodoo vixen and her dead lover think Doug's man-flesh is just what the witch doctor ordered.Viewers may remember movie composer Steven Severin from Siouxsie and the Banshees and Sara Stewart as Martha Wayne in Batman Begins.Fans of the genre seeking other intelligent entries of the same quality as London Voodoo might also enjoy Don't Look Now (1973), The Serpent and The Rainbow (1988), and True Believer (1989).

hello - what makes this film get any awards? Sorry, it's just that, at the very least, I'd like a movie to be believable. But right from the start this fails in the most basic ways. Firstly, the wife finds a body or bodies. Gee, the husband seems okay that the police not be called - afterall the wife reckons the bodies are 'old'. Gee, that's enough for the husband to want to let wifey keep her bodies in the cellar, and to keep her happy. Unbelievable. And then, as if this weren't enough to swallow, suddenly there's a knock on the door with a guy warning the hubbie the wifey's been possessed. Luckily I did not see it in some trendy art film festival - i would have burst out laughing.I turned this awful movie off after that - enough is enough. Clichés galore in the first few minutes.

London Voodoo is plainly the worst low budget horror I have ever seen... and I've seen almost all of 'em! I can't even think of enough bad words to describe it. Whoever made this film should be ashamed of themselves. Why would you put as much effort, time and money into producing such a pointless and boring piece of cinema? The film has nothing to hold the attention of fans of *any* genre let alone horror.I've seen more interesting things crawling along the baseboards in camp restrooms. Good grief... I'm simply lost for words at how bad this is. Choose anything but this to fill up your time... anything!

I remember as a youngster, the very idea of voodoo was terribly creepy. Zombies and dark sweaty bodies, insane eyes glaring out from behind skull-like make-up. The strange wildness of the night, fire, jungle, rendered into the human world, in a sort of similar terror to the alien nightmare of the serial killer. The werewolf maybe. The sensual madness lurking just below our thin veil of civilisation.Sadly, London Voodoo doesn't even come close. I was hoping for something which would help me revisit all those delicious old fears, but unfortunately the film entirely missed the mark.Now, don't get me wrong. I think this is a good film. Well written, well acted, unusual subject matter for the horror genre of the moment, so in its way original. But I think it suffered unfairly from cheap production values, and an inattention to detail which gave it more of the feel of a made-for-TV drama than a horror film.Some horror film makers succeed in getting out there and making something really scary, moody, atmospheric, for very little money. Blair Witch, Raimi's early films, etc. In those films, the low budgets actually prove a boon, as bad lighting etc can add an extraordinary atmosphere. London Voodoo, however, looks as though it's been shot on betacam (although it's probably Digital Vid), and the whole film is stark, ordinary. Looks like an episode of Neighbours or Eastenders.As to horror. The scary voodoo practitioners, the terrifying voodoo priest with his top hat and snake? Well, nowhere to be found. We're instead, I think, meant to be frightened by the ordinary family falling apart, to imagine the horror in the unseen, the collapse of the ordinary. However the lack of shadows, of darker spaces, in the very look of the film make that very hard to do.I will say, however, that although I emphasise this, it was really a single problem, and otherwise the film was very well done. The performances were excellent, the writing was very good (except the annoying nanny character who was really just a cliché and a distraction), and the direction was fairly good. A brave effort, I think, but one which doesn't really succeed in what it set out to achieve.Oh, and although the acting was good, the American accents were disgraceful. I mean, if you're not going to get actual Americans, why bother?