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Somewhere in rural Nigeria: The cattle of the locals has started dying
under mysterious circumstances, and the local witch doctor claims it's the
vengeance of the Gods, and the locals ought to pay him part of their
livestock to protect them from more evil. Most of the locals are
superstitious folks, and they listen to the witch doctor, only the local
priest, pastor Emanuel, warns them to not turn away from God, but the
witch doctor's arguments seem to be much more convincing, like when he
predicts the death of a woman ... and then sees to it that she dies - by a
snake by the way who crawls inside her butt when she's on the toilet and
makes her way all the way to the mouth. So the pastor calls in a police
inspector to investigate, and the first thing he does is to kill a goat -
something that hit the nail on the head, because it seems the witch
doctor's life energy was hidden away in the goat, and now it's dead, the
witch doctor starts dying - but somehow gets a piece of the goat to eat so
he returns to life and health. He then has his revenge when one of his
followers blows some powder into the inspector's face that almost kills
him. But thanks to the pastor and his daughter, the inspector pulls
through. Now that the inspector has survived, the witch doctor's grip on
the local starts to weaken - so he raises the dead and lets them loose on
the village. Most of the locals flee, but the inspector, the pastor, his
daughter and a few others decide to barricade themselves in inside the
village church and sit the zombie attack out. And eventually, they take
the fight to the witch doctor, and ultimately manage to kill him and burn
his temple. Over the last quarter of a century or so, Nigeria
has developed quite a booming shot-on-video movie industry, shot on video
because the country has next to no movie theatres and yet the Nigerians
prefer local over imported films. However, most Nigerian films are shot on
the dirt-cheap, and with less than perfect equipment, and it almost
invariably shows on screen. Sometime the enthusiasm of the filmmakers can
at least make up for this, other times, well ... The Witch Doctor of
the Living Dead was made at the beginning of the homevideo trend,
according to several sources it was even the first Nigerian homevideo
altogether. What that means for the film is quite obvious: Nobody really
understood the technology back then, and that shows in everything from
camerawork to editing and thus pacing (after all, editing from camcorder
to tape, there is no way to reedit without taking everything that has
happened later apart), from the poor sound quality to the (technical)
inability to have on-set sound and musical score on the soundtrack at the
same time. So yes, at least seen with the eyes of a European reviewer
from 26 years later, this is a terrible movie where the shortcomings
outbalance the qualities (mostly the rawness of the shocks and horror
scenes) by far. But rather than just see the badness of it all, the film
has to be seen as a starting point of a whole new film industry, and if
nothing else, at least the enthusiasm put into this movie does shine
through at points (even if enthusiasm alone doesn't improve the quality of
any film).
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