The Skeleton Key (2005)

Rating: 3/5

Where do I start? Well I love movies that take place in New Orleans and involve voodoo, well in this case hoodoo, but I wasn't satisfied.

It was really the ending I didn't much care for but we'll get to that at the end.

So this girl works in hospice and the place she works at she doesn't feel cares about the elderly dying so she starts looking for another job. She finds one taking care of a man who had a stroke that paralyzed both sides of his body, when I believe it usually only paralyzes one. The first time she takes care of him in his bed he grips her arm really tight and looks at her with a face that would tell other people to get the hell out of that house. His wife is a traditional souther woman who's just kinda there. 

So the girl, Caroline, gets a skeleton key that opens all the doors and the elderly woman conveniently forgot a package of seeds for her garden and instead of getting them herself decides to send Caroline to get them from her attack. Now obviously they need to be in the attack for the storyline to work but who the hell keeps seeds in the attic, that is so inconvenient; you keep them in your shed a few feet away from your garden not three flights up in your house. So Caroline goes to the attack and there's some rattling and being a dumb white girl she goes to check it out. What does she find? A door. A door that her skeleton key doesn't open. So she takes the seeds back down to the woman and instead of forgetting about the door, that she would have absolutely no business using, she decides to try to open it. 

So when the woman is doing her own thing Caroline sneaks up there to try to open, and she figures it out and finds all kinds of jars of possibly body parts, and a scarecrow type doll and some records. So the woman starts calling for her, asking if she wants sweet tea, which should be a no because that's gross, but not the point. The woman looks everywhere for her, and she starts coming up to the attic and Caroline freaks out and breaks a jar of something and steals a record and hides. She doesn't get caught, good for her.

Then scenes where her roommate explains hoodoo and that her aunt believes in it and she shows her where her aunt shops for the stuff, and being a smart girl she tells her don't mess with it and of course she doesn't listen. 

So Caroline believes that Ben (the old man she's taking care of) believes that he is under a curse of some sort so she goes to the hoodoo shop for stuff for a spell to make him better. She goes up to Ben's room when the woman is sleeping to perform the spell on him. While doing it he begins to speak and of course the woman comes up and is banging on the door and Caroline is freaking out and Ben's trying to warn her that this is all his wife's fault, and Caroline apparently doesn't comprehend that. So the wife comes in and tells Caroline to go to bed she won't be needed for the rest of the night, she obviously doesn't want Caroline helping Ben.

So Caroline starts believing in hoodoo which is what causes her downfall. 

To get to the ending I guess I need to explain the story from the movie that the woman told Caroline:
The house used to belong to a family with two kids, and they had servants (slaves) that they mistreated and abused. One night they had a party with all kinds of important people and they were all drunk, and before leaving they wanted to say goodbye to the children. Well they couldn't find the children so they started to turn it into a game (because when your drunk missing children doesn't seem as bad as it really is). So they finally heard some shit going on in the attic and when they got up there the two slaves, Justify and Cecile, were teaching the children hoodoo. Well these rich white folks were having none of that so they took the slaves to the front yard to hang and burn them while they continued drinking.

So somehow Justify and Cecile had already done some kind of sacrifice spell and just body hopped throughout the years. Cecile was in the old woman's body and Justify was in the lawyers body who I didn't mention because I don't want to spend forever on this stupid movie. At the end Cecile transferred into Caroline's body and bitches because she's sick of being white, but all the black girls don't mess with hoodoo so they got the hell out of there, smart, smart, smart. 

I didn't like the end because in the story they said Justify and Cecile only did mean spells to mean/evil people, and they turned into mean/evil people who just want to continually hurt nice, innocent hospice people who just want to help, so it was dumb that evil won in this movie because it shouldn't have.