It’s hard to believe how much of an impact a cruddy, little movie like “The Blair Witch Project” can have. Every small-time, hack filmmaker seems to want a piece of the cheesy horror market that the “Blair Witch” clowns exploited so successfully. That’s why the plot of this flick, “Da Hip Hop Witch”, is so distressingly familiar and even more distressingly dumb. This time it’s about five white kids going into black housing projects in New Jersey and disappearing. Did they get beaten to death like they deserved? No, the answer is way sillier than that, supposedly they’ve run afoul of the title witch. As the DVD cover says “the kids are still missing.” We weren’t so lucky with the film itself.
The jerky white kids include Mia (Mia Tyler, sister of Liv, daughter of Steven–and plus-sized supermodel of the moment–who apparently isn’t getting offered the top shelf roles her sis has managed to snag and has to settle for this crap). She and her cohorts are drawn to the projects after hearing that rap artists had started turning up missing. Is this supposed to be a bad thing? As for the pack of whiteys, they hail from the unfortunate locale of Framingham, Massachusetts–which they are quick to point out is close to Salem–home of old timey witch hunts and a lot of tacky Halloween merchandising.
There are cameos by a number of rappers, and the first thing that becomes apparent is that rappers–at least in this movie–say the word “fuckin'” alot. There doesn’t seem to be a good reason for it, except they probably can’t really articulate a thought in the english language that has any kind of power without slathering it with expletives. Although, they use the f-word incessantly in mundane conversation, too. But, hey, to each his own. Clearly, all the nasty talk has been instrumental in getting them the “fly” digs they like to crow about on insipid shows like MTV’s “Cribs”. And the youngsters seem to really admire their verbally-challenged heroes. Word!
Possibly the most obnoxious person in the film is Eminem. This bleach-blond yahoo is hard to take under any circumstances, and even a cameo by him is almost unbearable. When he starts jabbering about what a “cool white guy” he is, you’ll be wishing you could take your television’s remote control and drive it through his empty skull. The film is bad enough as it is, but the inclusion of this nonstop bullshitter to the proceedings takes things to another level of hellishness. Sadly enough, “Da Hip Hop Witch” is really no worse than a lot of dopey features out there. It’s just not entertaining.
