I knew I was in for some deep-tissue pain when this movie opened with a voiceover that sounds more like a fifth-grade book report:
Every Mardi Gras, college girls have ended up missing. Nobody knows who is kidnapping the girls, but legend has it that there is a bayou cult which split off to practice their own form of voodoo. Voodoo was started hundreds of years ago as a good religion and a way for slaves to release their demons. But now, some people have twisted the ways of voodoo. The bayou cult is known for deviant rituals and female sacrifice.
Later in the movie, a character actually repeats the lines verbatim, as if the writers thought, “This is literary gold! It can’t be contained to one moment!” Actually, director Daniel Zirilli, who also shat out CrossBones, probably wanted to remind us early on that Voodoo Tailz is supposed to be a horror movie, because watching it, you could easily confuse it with a travelogue.
We begin in Los Angeles, where a Rainbow Coalition of college students — blonde Rose, Latina Luna, black Nicky and later, redhead Sarah — decide to go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. And thus begin the MONTAGES. We get musical montages of the girls driving cross-country, the girls arriving in New Orleans, the girls walking around New Orleans, the girls changing clothes in New Orleans, the girls partying in New Orleans, New Orleans partying without the girls, random swamp land around New Orleans without partying, the girls partying in their hotel room, the girls partying in New Orleans again and even Rose dreaming about partying. This movie should’ve been called Voodoo Montagez or more accurately, Voodoo Padding, because 20 of the 65-minute running time is just a bunch of fluff. Unfortunately, these might be the best moments in the movie.
The rest is cheap and poorly acted with a generic story about a killer cult and inexplicable scenes that have nothing to do with the plot — including a series of faux commercials/TV shows and Rose repeatedly dreaming of being on a parade float (!). There are red herrings galore, but they only have an impact if you care about the story or the characters, which you don’t. There’s no one in the film who looks even remotely like the ominous guy on the DVD box cover (although the cover art still makes more sense than the title — WTF are tailz?); all of the black people are actually good guys. This means, of course, that at least one of them has to die, but on the other hand, two of them end up saving the helpless white gals from a cult apparently made up of white or “other” races who’ve corrupted original voodoo practices — sort of like hip-hop.
