Five college friends gather for a small reunion in an infamous Italian castle. Local legend holds that the lady of the manor, Johanna of Anjou, was into witchcraft and caused a nasty drought and famine in the area. Villagers being villagers, they hung her ass and, persecuted witches being persecuted witches, Johanna threw out a curse and then killed herself. The curse was said to be placed on her journal and a night of drunken curiosity leads to the group finding the ancient book in a forbidden room and unleashing the pissed off spirit of Johanna of Anjou. The nightmare scenario is all caught on the hand camera of one of the Italian idiots (with some phone and security footage added). A sure way to spice up any horror outing is to utilize the atmospheric European architecture and that gives this standard fare a leg up in the found footage department. Unfortunately, the characters are all annoying which makes it difficult to get through the stretches where nothing is happening but these derps hanging out or getting frustrated with each other… and that’s the majority of the film. The supernatural entity is pretty cool, which makes it even more offensive that she’s not featured all that much. American audiences hate reading and unfortunately that’s where the market for this shit is, so we have a bunch of Italians speaking English so a lot of them sound like they have an extra chromosome (the man behind the camera acts like he has special needs so it may not be the second language in his case) but it’s not their fault. Hell, I can barely speak English and that’s the only language I got. At least we can take comfort in knowing Italy can do found footage just as bad as we here in the states.
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