Not Scary, Slow Paced and Just Plain Weird

Rating: 4/10 (19 February 2016)

I saw "The Witch", starring Anya Taylor-Joy-Atlantis_tv, Vampire Academy; Ralph Ineson-Guardians of the Galaxy, Game of Thrones_tv; Kate Dickie-Game of Thrones_tv, Prometheus and Bathsheba Garnett-P2, Mean Girls.
I heard a little bit about this movie, before I saw it; that it was a small budget independent horror film with some really good scares. Not so. It's not very scary at all, more on the weird side than anything and it is very slow paced. Ralph and Kate are the devout Christians in 1630's New England that are forced to leave the colonial American settlement they have been living in with their 5 kids-I did not really understand the reason why they had to leave-and find a new home, away from everyone. After building a new house in the middle of nowhere, Ralph and Kate let Anya, the oldest daughter of the 5 kids, watch her baby brother in a clearing near the edge of the forest. Unbeknown to the family, Bathsheba is their neighbor and she performs strange black magic witchcraft during the night. Her latest ritual calls for a baby and Bathsheba decides it won't be a big deal if she was to just pop over and borrow a cup of baby. That is when the whole family starts acting strange and accusing each other of being witches, their animals start acting weird and their crops suddenly go bad. I read that the director used real transcripts from this time period to make the dialogue sound authentic but I had problems sometimes just understanding them, you know, with the thick English accents. As far as the set pieces and the look of the movie itself, they did do a good job on that. It's rated "R" for violence and sexual content-including nudity-and has a running time of 1 hour & 32 minutes. I would not buy this on DVD. I would not rent it on DVD, either, if I were you. If you really want to see it, you should wait until it comes to cable.