I just noticed bunch of movies in the Witchcraft series showed up on Amazon Prime. I think there are like five of them on there. And this particular Witchcraft was not that great, but not bad enough that I'll avoid the sequels. But after a little research, it turns out there are 16 of these! Although from the imdb descriptions it seems like we just might be getting into softcore porn stuff the deeper we get into the series. (For example, for part 5: a warlock "uses beautiful, large-breasted, and frequently nude women to try to collect enough souls... [to] bring Satan to Earth.") We'll see what happens.
My Synopsis: Grace and her creepy husband John have just had a baby. Because John always has to work, they've decided to stay at Grandma's house (on John's side). But Grandma is sort of creepy, and Grace starts having weird dreams about the place, and what effect it could have on her newborn child. Then some craziness starts happening to Grace's friends and family - but how much of it is just in her head?
Elaborate Genre: Haunted House Psychological Witch Movie
Overall: Not that bad, not that good. My big takeaway is that the people behind Witchcraft were really trying - it feels like a very earnest attempt, at the very least. But it ends up being kind of meh...
First things first, the opening of the film is kind of intense. It's pretty much just five solid minutes of burning and screaming. It's your classic "burn the witch!" opening, but it feels like it goes on FOREVER. To the point where it's kind of funny.
But after that - and a quick 'baby having' scene - things settle down and we meet Mom. Grace is a quiet, kind of mousy woman - the script gives her an interesting backstory but doesn't bother to do anything with it. One of her friends describes her "sexy foreign accent" - but I sure couldn't place where she was from. It's unusual sounding, and sounded at times like she was just American and bad at faking an accent? Although the actress' name (Anat Topol) seems to imply it's legit. But whatever - she's also apparently a recovering drug addict. There's a scene where she says that John rescued her from "going from fix to fix." But it's mentioned once and never has squat to do with the proceedings, much like her international background.
Unless her backstory is just there as an excuse as to why she would be with a piece of shit like her husband John. It's not like he's abusive or anything, but he's pretty clearly a scuzzball and is not supportive of Grace or the new baby at all. He always talks about how he has to "go to work," but whatever it is that he does is never mentioned. So yeah, either Witchcraft has a kind of shitty script, or Grace is an idiot and John is a bad liar.
The "haunting" stuff can be kind of entertaining at times. While there isn't an awful lot of legitimate tension in the film (I don't think you really care about the characters that much, and even the baby in peril situation doesn't help), there are a couple of scenes that are fun. The scares themselves are not particularly well executed over the course of a given scene, but the outcome is just so off the wall that you find yourself looking back on it rather fondly. (Priest guy, I'm looking at you.)
There's not an awful lot by way of gore or violence, but what you get is pretty well done. But action is certainly not a strong point of the film - the fight/action scenes (or whatever) are often confusingly edited and you can't always tell exactly what is going on. There was one key scene that I had to watch a couple of times because the way it was edited made it difficult to tell just who was doing what to who.
One big problem with Witchcraft is the music. It's got this overdone synthy soundtrack that is just too much. There feels like there's a *lot* of music in the film, and it's always in your face - loud, with just too much movement in it, if that makes any sense. The music draws attention to itself would it should just be supporting a scene, and after a while it just gets kind of annoying.
But still, I found myself kind of liking Witchhcraft. It's an earnest attempt at a scary movie - it's not trying to be cheesy, and I don't know if there's even a joke in the film. (So don't let the fact that it's presented by Troma fool you.) And even though the music is a bit much, it's trying to build a creepy atmosphere. So it feels a little weird to give a movie a pass based on what it's *trying* to do, rather that what it actually accomplishes. It's a very light recommend, but still:
I would kind of recommend this film.
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