The Haunting of Dom Pedro (2025) Review
It’s easier to make a movie today than it ever was before. All you need to get started is a camera, cast, and crew. However, that doesn’t mean every movie is great or even good. Take The Haunting of Dom Pedro, for example. I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be a gag movie, since it has all the trappings of one: poor acting, a nonsensical plot, and questionable editing choices. I found myself laughing awkwardly half of the time with the film’s offbeat humor. However, the other half just left me staring in awkward confusion.
The movie starts out with three trailers for other films within the universe before we get to our main story. What would that be? We have a high school friend group, Kayden, Jayden, Payden and Hayden, who don’t care about their Latin America class. They fail a test on the subject of Dom Pedro and then he haunts them. He kills Payden and Hayden and Kayden and Jaden begin an investigation into their friends’ mysterious deaths. However, the film gets complicated from here on. Kayden and Jayden unravel a bizarre mystery surrounding Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and witchcraft. Why? I don’t know. As they continue their investigation, they come closer to the identity of Dom Pedro and the darkness surrounding his name.
Before we get started, I’d like to ask one question: what is this movie’s tone? Judging by the synopsis, it sounds like a horror film, right? Well, as you watch the movie, it seems like anything other than horror. If it is, I think my bunny slippers were startled. Is it supposed to be funny? The most laughter it got out of me was a slight chuckle. Oh! But maybe it’s supposed to be a horror comedy! A movie that makes fun of conventional horror tropes whilst still making you scared and laugh! If that’s the case, it failed on both fronts. So what emotion is this movie supposed to invoke? This is the real question I was asking myself while watching the movie. Hell, I was over halfway through the entire film, and I STILL didn’t know what I was supposed to feel!
Which leads to the editing and production. What do you expect when you walk into a horror film? A muted color palette, contrasting shadows, and creepy ambient music, right? Well, you’ll get none of that here. Not even Dom Pedro’s ghostly voice is creepy! It just sounds like a guy reading his lines in a recording booth. And it certainly doesn’t help that the cast itself never feels frightened. Rather, they sound uninterested most of the time. Or better yet, interested in talking about other things. Like going on side tangents about what other movies they like! More on that later. But there are even basic production problems you could easily catch. For example, there’s a scene near the beginning where the friends show each other memes they’ve made poking fun at Dom Pedro. Yet their phone screens are completely black when they do this. How can you miss that? Was it too difficult to make a meme? Additionally, voices will suddenly increase in volume despite the characters not changing their inflection.
This is one of those films where so little happens in a feature film runtime. I can summarize the plot with just a couple of sentences since it’s so basic. So, what does the movie do to fill in the extra runtime? Why, feature bands that play songs that are barely relevant to the plot! This isn’t a musical; why do we need to hear an entire song? To hear a thinly veiled metaphor for the plot disguised as an acoustic arrangement? If I wanted that, I could re-watch this horror fest of a movie instead. Additionally, we are also treated to multiple advertisements for movies that exist within this movie, such as “Bigfoot Unleashed Part VII” and “I Swiped the Wrong One.” And I won’t lie, those trailers at the movie’s beginning were slightly cute. But why spend unnecessary time referencing those other films? They get referenced so often that I actually asked myself if I should be watching those other movies instead of this one!
You could argue this is one of those bizarre surrealistic movies á la anything made by Neil Breen. And this could be seen as a guilty pleasure of sorts. Perhaps it’s one of those “so bad, it’s good” types of bad movies. The story is so bizarrely confusing, any chance of taking this story seriously is thrown out the window. It’s fine enough as a gag or parody film, along the lines of Scary Movie or its spinoffs. And if that’s your thing, then more power to you. However, if you want a serious horror or even horror comedy, maybe go check out Fright Night (just avoid the sequel. And remake. And the remake’s sequel) or the first Scream movie instead.
