BESOTTED
Half a star
A cursed mess.
Running time: 92 min. Not rated (language, sexuality, full frontal nudity). At Village East, Second Avenue and 12th Street.
FORGET eye of newt and wing of bat – the witches’ brew “Besotted” contains much more prosaic ingredients.
Like props and sound effects that could have been borrowed from an off-off-Broadway play, a host of painfully strained performances and a plot that’s almost unbearably stupid.
First-time writer-director Holly Angell Hardman ill-advisedly steps in front of the camera, playing a lighthouse-dwelling sorceress who has an oversized cauldron boiling in the back yard and appalling taste in clothes.
She arrives one summer in a Cape Cod fishing village seemingly for no other reason than to meddle in the love life of the town drunk, a greasy-haired slob named Shep (played by the artist Jim Chiros).
Shep is intoxicated by the dubious charms of Vicky (Susan Gibney), a local fisherwoman with yellow bird’s-nest hair and a permanent, unattractive sneer, who in turn has a crush on a blandly handsome Harvard grad named Damien (Liam Waite.)
The whole thing comes off like a particularly amateurish episode of “Bewitched” that takes place during Spring Break, rather than the “Day for Night” homage Hardman no doubt intended (in the production notes, she cites Francois Truffaut as an influence).
This is the kind of movie in which one of the sorceress’ crude voodoo dolls is accidentally knocked over and – abracadabra – a character falls and sprains her knee.
There are more imaginative ways to make use of a minuscule budget.