Discovering good movies, one bad movie at a time

Witchcraft XIV: Angel of Death and Witchcraft XV: Blood Rose were shot at the same time by the same group of people. There should be no reason for them to be as far apart in quality as they are, and yet: Angel of Death is no great shakes, but it’s basically watchable as a bargain-basement […]

Thirteen is a pretty cool number of entries for a horror franchise to arrive at: it is the spooky number, and thus very auspicious. And when the Witchcraft movies became the very first horror series ever to arrive at its thirteenth entry in 2008, with Witchcraft 13: Blood of the Chosen, the series minders seemed […]

A franchise whose heights are as low as the Witchcraft series tends to force a pretty severe recalibration of one’s scale for “good” and “bad”, so it speaks to nothing at all that is objectively true for me to call Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood a pretty substantial jump up in quality. Or at least […]

In discussing any long-running series that doesn’t exactly swing from pole to pole, qualitywise, one of the trickiest parts in reviewing the individual entries can be figuring out where to start: what specifically makes this film different from all of those films? Happily, then, Witchcraft X: Mistress of the Craft – which premiered in 1998 […]

With Witchcraft IX: Bitter Flesh, we hit an exceptionally exciting milestone: the back half of the franchise. At the time of writing, anyway; the series came back after one nine-year hiatus, I am not in any way optimistic enough to assume it will not do so again. But for now, we celebrate. It’s a milestone […]

It took six entries – not six-hundred and sixty-six, though I can see where it feels like that many – for the Witchcraft franchise to arrive at a point that I honestly expected to show up a lot sooner: a film entirely devoid of merit about which I despair of finding anything to say. I […]

Whatever one things of the seven films to date that make up the Conjuring Universe – I admire their guileless commitment to the “jump out and say boo!” qualities of a good cheesy ghost story, and the thick mountains of period atmosphere they wrap that commitment in – surely we must all agree that the […]

Ah, Witchcraft! Perhaps the only series of movies I have ever encountered where “the first super-porny one” and “thank God the acting is at least better this time” can be used to refer to one and the same entry. In this case, I am looking at 1993’s Witchcraft V: Dance with the Devil, which finds […]

There is really only one thing that we need to bother saying about Witchcraft II: The Temptress, which is that it’s a lot more fun to watch than its 1988 predecessor, Witchcraft. If we are being thoughtful about things and wish to treat the matter of evaluating cinema with all of the delicacy and care […]

To the Devil… a Daughter was one of the biggest hits Hammer Film Productions had enjoyed in years at the time of its 1976 release. Paradoxically, it’s also more or less the film that finally killed Hammer off. The studio hung around in a tattered way for a few years before disappearing: it managed to […]

A review requested by Rob Graham, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. I’m tempted to say that Messiah of Evil is good, but only by accident. Or good, but not  on purpose. These are silly thoughts, of course: other than a very few heavily ironic examples, nobody starts […]

We’re so far along the hype/anti-hype/counter-anti-hype path in regards to The Witch, a year and more after it was the toast of Sundance 2015, that I really don’t know what we’re “meant” to think about it at this point. I am merely content to therefore claim that I really liked it, anyway. And I do […]