Some of the most memorable and iconic movies of all time have been inspired by or take place in the music world. From This Is Spinal Tap to Almost Famous, music films span all genres and indeed all levels of quality.
And just like the wider world of cinema has its own agreed-upon worst moments, your Plan 9 from Outer Spaces, your Manos: The Hands of Fates, and your Battlefield Earths, so does the music film genre.
It’s called Da Hip Hop Witch and if you’ve never heard of it, that’s hardly surprising, but it deserves to be ranked among the aforementioned atrocities as one of the worst films of all time and singled out as the worst music film ever.
Da Hip Hop Witch was released in 2000, at the height of hip-hop’s supplantation of rock as the primary method for suburban whiteboys to work out their feelings. It was the apex of Eminem-mania and the Up in Smoke Tour was the most FOMO’d gig of the summer.
It was apparently this hip-hop mania that inspired “filmmaker” Dale Anthony Resteghini to produce Da Hip Hop Witch. The film’s primary claim to fame is the fact that Resteghini somehow managed to tap a string of prominent rappers to appear in the film.
Honestly, the list of cameos is actually pretty impressive. Somehow, Resteghini managed to coax the likes of Eminem, Ja Rule, Mobb Deep, Pras, Rah Digga, and more believably pop singer Vitamin C (yes, the graduation song girl) and Vanilla Ice into appearing in his project.
The plot, if you want to call it that, casts Resteghini as one of five white suburban kids who attempt to find ‘The Hip Hop Witch’, a mythical entity responsible for attacking rappers, who see their record sales go up after they get attacked.
The five protagonists enact a plot to find the Witch in order to launch their own rap careers and encounter various rap stars along the way, who all describe their own interactions with the titular witch in a series of inebriated and pathetically improvised interviews.
There’s also a side-plot about a reporter who’s investigating the attacks in the hopes of launching her career as a journalist. But none of this really matters, because the film is effectively unwatchable. No, really.
It’s not bad in the way that Plan 9 or The Room are bad. Da Hip Hop Witch is not bad in a good or funny way. It’s bad in a torturously painful way, in a way that inspires anger and vitriol instead of laughter and pity.
The film was one of the many, many, many, many The Blair Witch Project parodies that came out in the early-2000s. The independently made, found-footage horror film had come out the year before and quickly became a cultural phenomenon.
But where most of the Blair Witch parodies (which were all pretty awful) were made by people who saw the original as an excuse to make a few fart jokes, Resteghini saw the film’s found-footage format as an excuse to not try.
Let’s face it, The Blair Witch Project wasn’t a very good film, but at the very least you got the sense that the filmmakers tried to make it good. Not so with Da Hip Hop Witch, which is a meandering series of irritating vignettes.
To put it all in context, Eminem later had his lawyers request his scenes be removed from the film. Despite this, the filmmakers plastered his face all over the posters and promotional material for the film as if he was the star of the project a la 8 Mile.
Any selling point the film might have is simply a facade hiding its undeniable crappiness. The improvisation was likely the result of no one bothering to write a script and watching the cameos, one gets a sense that the rappers thought they were just wilding out for someone’s camera.
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The only acting comes from Resteghini and his co-stars, whose thespian skills won’t be winning Oscars any time soon and the film is one of the most damningly reviewed of all time. It doesn’t actually have a Rotten Tomatoes score because editors could only find three reviews.
Over on IMDB, it commands a score of 1.6 and a long list of forum posts asking if the film is actually real or some sort of in-joke between a bunch of rappers. The AV Club noted that the ‘To Be Continued’ at the end is the scariest part of the film.
Recent years have seen some pretty bad music-based movies come out, as well as some pretty good ones. But Da Hip Hop Witch is in a league of its own. If anything, it will go down as the worst music movie of all time.
