Voodoo Tailz

Rating

Director

Daniel Zirilli

Screenplay

Daniel Zirilli, Carl Washington

Length

1h 18m

Starring

Merlynne Williams, Moon Jones, Daniel Zirilli, Demina Becker, Yhuri Brown, Cyd Casados, Louis De La Costa

MPAA Rating

R

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
A trio of Los Angeles girls decides to take a road trip east to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Their arrival is heralded by mayhem at the hands of a mysterious voodoo cult in the ultra-low-budget Voodoo Tailz.

Rose (Stefanie Tremblay), Luna (Demina Becker) and Nicky (Merlynne Williams) arrive in New Orleans and immediately separate. Nicky goes off for a one-night stand with her ex-boyfriend, leaving Luna and Rose to her sister Jacky (Yuri Brown). Jacky leads the girls on a wild evening out on the night before Mardi Gras. Rose ends up losing track of her partners and wanders the streets until she finds Nicky again.

Joined by their west coast friend Sara (Cyd Casados), they embark on a chaotic journey of celebration on the night of Fat Tuesday. Before enjoining their entertaining evening, they stop to visit a Voodoo priestess (Demara Khan) who warns them to leave New Orleans as their friends have befallen a horrible fate.

The next morning, they discover Rose is missing and rejoin their quest to find the missing women, paying another visit to the Voodoo priestess who leads them on their final excursion to find the truth of what happened to their friends and family.

Voodoo Tailz is an embarrassment of filmmaking. Much to viewers’ chagrin, the movie’s advertising is misleading. The packaging makes the film seem like a dark, erotic thriller surrounding Voodoo rituals, but it turns out to be a schlocky horror film with paper-thin characters, puny performances and plenty of useless narrative.

Director Daniel Zirilli shows no mercy on his audience with his rampant lack of control. His actors move without his assistance and spout their dialogue as if they are reading from cue cards. He motivates the story slowly through useless cutaway shots, poor music selection and, with his screenwriting partner Carl Washington, a painfully weak script. The characters are as unrealistic as an incorruptible politician and the premise is so outdated that the cockroaches mentioned in one of the film’s scenes wouldn’t have scavenged over its remains.

Zirilli can take most of the blame, but his actors are also at least partially responsible for this decrepit movie. Tremblay, Becker and Casados perform like rejects from a pornographic film. Meanwhile, the male actors, like Joseph Solari as Rose’s boyfriend Rick, are as stiff as cardboard boxes. The only half-way decent performance in the film is given by Williams, whose in-your-face attitude provides just the right tempo to make viewers feel that it belongs in a bigger budget — and better – movie.

Voodoo Tailz is a film that audiences will love to hate. It will wisely be avoided outright by many, but will entice other viewers in and then spit them out with a warped sense of what filmmaking is. There will be fans who can relate to its characters, but will have enjoyed it more for its brief nudity than for the narrative substance that is largely missing from its length. Anyone who enjoys powerful, entertaining and artistic movies should stay away from this stinking mess.

Review Written

April 10, 2003