Black Sunday is basically a vampire film even if it is technically about witches. Yes, there is a bit of a nuance here of course but lets just say that this will not end up being a big winner or anything like that. Sometimes these old school horror titles can pull off the upset victory but this was not going to follow suit as it falls into pretty much every horror pitfall imaginable.

The film starts off with a witch about to be executed. The humans want to really make it hurt this time so they’ve made a mask that will basically keep on stabbing her until she’s dead. So with the last of her energy she sends out a curse to them. We jump forward 200 years from that point where Andrej and Choma are heading off to a scientists convention when they run into some carriage issues and have to stop at a local haunted mansion. A lady named Katia lives there and this works just fine for Andrej who immediately begins to like her. What he doesn’t realize is that she is the ancestor of the witch Asa and he is about to have the most dangerous days of his life. Can he survive this?

I have to give the villain props for making a lot of moves as soon as she is revived. She quickly mind controls one of the scientists with vampire witch mind control, bumps off one of the characters, and brings in another ally from the grave. She was really set to dominate but ultimately just takes too long which gives Andrej time to figure out what’s going on here. She really needs to bump off just a few more people. She also came rather close at the end but relies on trickery instead of actually finishing off the job. She should have stabbed the main guy from behind or something.

I guess physically she isn’t super strong or anything like that but I would still expect her to at least be able to do this much in a fight. So she gets some points here but part of her success really comes from the heroes just making mistake after mistake as opposed to her being a stable genius or anything like that.

Andrej is an okay main character I guess. He probably falls in love a bit too easily and is slow on the uptake. I’m never too harsh on these guys for not believing in the supernatural right away but Choma was being suspicious from early on and Andrej should have caught that a bit more. At least he managed to catch the trick at the end and didn’t fall for Asa’s charms. Honestly that’s probably more than I could say for a bunch of other main characters.

Just about the opposite is true on all accounts for Choma. He does fall for Asa’s tricks and shows no real willpower of his own. The guy jeopardizes everyone and it all stems from the fact that he was not built for this. Javutich works as a decent sub villain. He actually does have full on super strength so it’s only thanks to some plot armor that the heroes were able to stop him. There are a lot of ways he should have been able to end the film early for Asa.

As for Katia, she’s not a bad heroine but it can be a bit annoying how she panics at everything. She could have alerted the heroes that something was going on a lot earlier but faints and generally doesn’t handle things very well. If she had kept her guard up more then this could have all been different. The cast is fairly small at least so you get to really focus on each of them. By now you’re probably wondering why it’s so weak though right? Surely this is about the same as every other C horror title.

In a lot of ways that’s true but the whole witch/vampire stuff is always going to hurt. I can’t take the visual hypnosis all that seriously where the guy just can’t help but make a move on her. That’s always going to be an extremely hard sell for me. Then the film also makes another big critical error in having some animal violence. As soon as there were some guard dogs in the estate you knew that things would not be going too well which is definitely a shame. The effects they use to show all of the stab marks on Asa are also quite eerie. In general it’s not like the film is super violent or anything like that but it’s not afraid to have some of that disturbing imagery running around.

The writing isn’t bad. All of the characters are able to have full conversations and talk like professionals. I can always appreciate that at least. In this case it’s not enough to get the film up to the next level or anything though. Writing can only get you so far when the rest of the film is not up to to task after all. I’d also say there isn’t really a whole lot to the film. There aren’t a bunch of jump scares and in general it’s not all that frightening. We have the creepy elements and some disturbing moments but that’s really it. The film tends to have a fairly casual tone otherwise.

Overall, Black Sunday is not really a film that I’d recommend. I’ve certainly seen worse films of course but this one is really not doing anything new or different. It’s not going to make sure that you remember it or anything like that. Having a witch as the villain could have actually been real interesting but the film doesn’t do anything with it. She’s not casting a bunch of spells or anything like that. All of the deaths tend to be blood related or just being overpowered which doesn’t take advantage of being a witch. So it felt like this was all one massive missed opportunity. The way the film plays out, you’d think that the writer really wanted to make a vampire film but wasn’t allowed to or something like that. The ending is almost comical with how fast it moves and the villagers showing up the way they did. Technically it’s dark for one character at least but it was all just so sudden.

Overall 3/10