You know, I've got a bad feeling, too. Nah, it's just my hemorrhoids.
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 entertainment value. This is, at a minimum the goofiest of the Witchcraft movies since Witchcraft V: Dance with the Devil, and there is a very real possibility that Dance with the Devil was and remains the goofiest Witchcraft of them all. And if I cannot have quality (and I can't), and I cannot even have basic, "I graduated from film school" levels of professional aptitude (and I can't have that either), then I'll damn well take goofiness.
Honestly, in a lot of ways, the eleventh, count 'em, Witchcraft movie, and the last one released on a more-or-less annual schedule stretching all the way back to the very first Witchcraft in 1988, feels like a sincere attempt to get back to the core competencies of the series. Which, to a certain extent, is my attempt to say, in appropriately gentlemanly language "good God, there is so much more nudity in this one than the last couple". Sisters of Blood isn't the sleaziest Witchcraft, and it isn't the porniest Witchcraft, but it is perhaps the Witchcraft with the most even distribution of sex scenes across its running time (90 minutes, which ends up feeling dragged-out, but not so powerfully unendurable as some of these have been). And with happy inevitability, this means that it is one of the least-boring entries this series has ever produced. Look, one takes the good where one can find it.
It's also a back-to-basics entry in terms of its plot: for the first time in a while, we have a Witchraft picture that's about a crime being investigated by LAPD detectives Lutz (Stephanie Beaton, logging her third and final trip to the role) and Garner (Mikul Robins, appearing for the second time - this I think represents the first time in the series that two actors have reprised their role in the same production), and when it turns out to have a paranormal element, warlock lawyer Will Spanner (James Servais) noses in to investigate with the help of his fiancée Kelly (Wendy Blair). Indeed, writer-director Ron Ford is so eager to make sure we know immediately that things are back to normal after the Will-less, Garner-less, set-in-London Witchcraft X: Mistress of the Craft, he starts the story off with a scene of Will and Kelly snuggling in bed and chatting about how they're going to go see the play her sister is starring in later. The effect is mildly ruined by the fact that neither Servais nor Blair have been in any of these movies before, and ruined further by the fact that Servais looks way, way older than the last few Wills have, so that I, for one, had no idea who these people were until Kelly mentioned Will having an upcoming court case. But still, it's a nice gesture.
Kelly's sister turns out to be a college drama student named Colleen (Miranda Odell), and the play turns out to be Macbeth, in which she and her friends Maria (Lauren Ian Richards) and Keri (Kathleen St. Lawrence) are playing the three - wait for it - witches. It's extremely tough to tell the three of them apart, at least until the plot starts to differentiate them; in addition to having similar names, Colleen and Keri (I am very nearly certain that the latter's name is why Kelly's name has been revised from Keli in all the earlier movies where she appears) have exactly the same color blond hair. Maria, at least, makes it easy for us by being a redhead. Colleen has a boyfriend whose name I didn't entirely catch, and I'm not sure which actor he's played by, but my best guess is that he's Bruce (Mark Shady). He's a real pip, too, a divorcée who keeps whinging in his first scene about how he'd love it so much of Colleen would let him take care of her while she tries to make her career work, since what killed his marriage was that his ex-wife wouldn't just relax and let him be the family's sole breadwinner. And he says this despite looking to be maybe 19 years old. But we'll meet Maybe!Bruce later on. Actually, at this point in time, Keri is actually the most important of the three, since she's the one sleeping with the play's director, Arthur Ramsden (Don Donason), and also conspiring with him to use the other two girls as dupes in their plot to raise the demon Abbadon from the fiery pit.
This involves convincing Maria and Colleen to travel to the cemetery on campus (we will eventually be able to figure out that this is a Catholic school, so it's not completely out of left field, but we sure don't know that yet) where 300 years ago, three witch sisters were buried in unhallowed ground (so, okay, it sort of is completely out of left field). The idea is, maybe the girls can get into character if they try conducting an actual witching ritual at the sisters' grave. And what this in fact does is to raise the spirits of the dead witches, one of whom immediately possesses Maria's body. This all happens while the girls are hopping around topless, naturally, which catches the eyes of some frat boys who'd come to the cemetery looking to goof around being assholes. "I'm getting rigor mortis in my pants just thinking about it" says one of them, watching the girls. Ah, cemetery boner humor! That's how you know this is art.
The movie has only just started, but there never turns out to be a whole lot more plot than that. The witches take over the girls (but not Colleen for a while, since she is the hero's girlfriend's sister), and Abbadon takes over Ramsden, and Lutz, Garner, and Will try to figure out what happened with the now-dead frat guys. Jump forward an hour, and Will stops the witches from winning. There's a portal to hell on campus - man, these Catholic schools have everything - and a simply ancient nun who seems to know all about where it is and how to protect it, Sister Seraphina (Anita Page, who has fallen quite a long way in the 71 years since she co-starred in the Best Picture Oscar winner The Broadway Melody - though I'll be honest, I had a much better time watching Sisters in Blood), and there's a bit of a race to see whether Will or the sisters will get that information first. Mostly, though, we just get scene upon scene upon scene of witch-Maria and witch-Keri swanning about with gleefully melodramatic ferocity, often doing so naked. It speaks to the movie's priorities, as well as its quantity of good taste, that the literally second Keri has been taken over, she and Maria start stripping each other's clothes off and making out. So, incestuous lesbian witch sisters, on top of everything.
This is barbarically shitty stuff, but that ends up being its saving grace. I would not hesitate for a moment to say that Sister in Blood has the worst acting of any Witchcraft thus far, and St. Lawrence in particular is just a world class disaster of a screen performer. Ford's dialogue isn't helping anybody out at all - there are a lot of expository lines of dialogue that feel like they've been welded together from three or four independent clauses - but St. Lawrence has a peerless amateur quality, the thing that non-actors do where they REALly over- EMPHasize stressed SYLlables - AND not alWAYS the corRECT syllables - because that is whence drama comes, or something. And it's not just that, it's also that she's wearing this massive shit-eating grin the whole time, and waggling her eyebrows like a skin-flick version of Groucho Marx. It's irresistibly terrible, and it makes the sisters' pantomime villain work so much better to have it founded upon such a wildly out-of-control bit of scenery chewing as this.
So, as I said: silly. The whole thing feels like a great dumb lark, as long as Lutz and Garner aren't onscreen (they're just shrill, cynical assholes who are unpleasant to sit with for any length of time at all), both because the ineptitude is adorable and the plot is such a random collage of witchy moments. There is a scene where Maria and Keri try to get a priest to give up the key to the portal to hell by sexually assaulting him, and the actor playing the priest (David Allan Graf, I think) plays the reaction as a big petulant kid, crying like his mom just told him no more cookies. Later, the monsignor of the school (Joseph P. Haggerty) avoids the witches' evil ways by, with stately dignity flinging himself off a roof like, well, like a mannequin in a cassock.
It's pretty much wall-to-wall zany shit, and the fact that it has such a steady stream of nudity after two consecutive entries where the pornographic elements were frontloaded adds to the chipper, bouncy feeling. If you will. Plus, Sisters in Blood is the first time in forever that a Witchcraft movie has actually been in any meaningful way a horror film, and not just softcore where some of the characters are Satanists. There is actually some stage blood this time, something we haven't seen in ages and ages; Abbadon briefly appears in the form of a relatively respectable CGI effect (which is the more respectable, to be sure, for being brief). And when the witch-sisters' ghosts manifest to take over the girls' bodies, they do so in the form of these nasty-looking zombie-like creatures with glowing red eyes. It's not really much at all, but it is something, and it's nice to get the feeling that the creators of a Witchcraft picture actually care in some way about the integrity of the object they're trying to make - a feeling that also extends to this movie's unexpected respect for series continuity, such as it is, and Will's personal history, such as it is. It is, by every imaginable yardstick, a terrible piece of shit that couldn't be dumber if it tried; but it's the most watchable terrible piece of shit this franchise has produced in some long while, and eleven entries in, that's not to be taken for granted.
Reviews in this series
Witchcraft (Spera, 1988)
Witchcraft II: The Temptress (Woods, 1989)
Witchcraft III: The Kiss of Death ("Tillmans" [Feldman], 1991)
Witchcraft IV: The Virgin Heart (Merendino, 1992)
Witchcraft V: Dance with the Devil (Hsu, 1993)
Witchcraft 666: The Devil's Mistress (Davis, 1994)
Witchcraft 7: Judgement Hour (Girard, 1995)
Witchcraft VIII: Salem's Ghost (Barmettler, 1996)
Witchcraft IX: Bitter Flesh (Girard, 1997)
Witchcraft X: Mistress of the Craft (Cabrera, 1998)
Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood (Ford, 2000)
Witchcraft XII: In the Lair of the Serpent (Sykes, 2004)
Witchcraft 13: Blood of the Chosen (House, 2008)
Witchcraft XIV: Angel of Death (Palmieri, 2016)
Witchcraft XV: Blood Rose (Palmieri, 2016)
Witchcraft XVI: Hollywood Coven (Palmieri, 2016)
Honestly, in a lot of ways, the eleventh, count 'em, Witchcraft movie, and the last one released on a more-or-less annual schedule stretching all the way back to the very first Witchcraft in 1988, feels like a sincere attempt to get back to the core competencies of the series. Which, to a certain extent, is my attempt to say, in appropriately gentlemanly language "good God, there is so much more nudity in this one than the last couple". Sisters of Blood isn't the sleaziest Witchcraft, and it isn't the porniest Witchcraft, but it is perhaps the Witchcraft with the most even distribution of sex scenes across its running time (90 minutes, which ends up feeling dragged-out, but not so powerfully unendurable as some of these have been). And with happy inevitability, this means that it is one of the least-boring entries this series has ever produced. Look, one takes the good where one can find it.
It's also a back-to-basics entry in terms of its plot: for the first time in a while, we have a Witchraft picture that's about a crime being investigated by LAPD detectives Lutz (Stephanie Beaton, logging her third and final trip to the role) and Garner (Mikul Robins, appearing for the second time - this I think represents the first time in the series that two actors have reprised their role in the same production), and when it turns out to have a paranormal element, warlock lawyer Will Spanner (James Servais) noses in to investigate with the help of his fiancée Kelly (Wendy Blair). Indeed, writer-director Ron Ford is so eager to make sure we know immediately that things are back to normal after the Will-less, Garner-less, set-in-London Witchcraft X: Mistress of the Craft, he starts the story off with a scene of Will and Kelly snuggling in bed and chatting about how they're going to go see the play her sister is starring in later. The effect is mildly ruined by the fact that neither Servais nor Blair have been in any of these movies before, and ruined further by the fact that Servais looks way, way older than the last few Wills have, so that I, for one, had no idea who these people were until Kelly mentioned Will having an upcoming court case. But still, it's a nice gesture.
Kelly's sister turns out to be a college drama student named Colleen (Miranda Odell), and the play turns out to be Macbeth, in which she and her friends Maria (Lauren Ian Richards) and Keri (Kathleen St. Lawrence) are playing the three - wait for it - witches. It's extremely tough to tell the three of them apart, at least until the plot starts to differentiate them; in addition to having similar names, Colleen and Keri (I am very nearly certain that the latter's name is why Kelly's name has been revised from Keli in all the earlier movies where she appears) have exactly the same color blond hair. Maria, at least, makes it easy for us by being a redhead. Colleen has a boyfriend whose name I didn't entirely catch, and I'm not sure which actor he's played by, but my best guess is that he's Bruce (Mark Shady). He's a real pip, too, a divorcée who keeps whinging in his first scene about how he'd love it so much of Colleen would let him take care of her while she tries to make her career work, since what killed his marriage was that his ex-wife wouldn't just relax and let him be the family's sole breadwinner. And he says this despite looking to be maybe 19 years old. But we'll meet Maybe!Bruce later on. Actually, at this point in time, Keri is actually the most important of the three, since she's the one sleeping with the play's director, Arthur Ramsden (Don Donason), and also conspiring with him to use the other two girls as dupes in their plot to raise the demon Abbadon from the fiery pit.
This involves convincing Maria and Colleen to travel to the cemetery on campus (we will eventually be able to figure out that this is a Catholic school, so it's not completely out of left field, but we sure don't know that yet) where 300 years ago, three witch sisters were buried in unhallowed ground (so, okay, it sort of is completely out of left field). The idea is, maybe the girls can get into character if they try conducting an actual witching ritual at the sisters' grave. And what this in fact does is to raise the spirits of the dead witches, one of whom immediately possesses Maria's body. This all happens while the girls are hopping around topless, naturally, which catches the eyes of some frat boys who'd come to the cemetery looking to goof around being assholes. "I'm getting rigor mortis in my pants just thinking about it" says one of them, watching the girls. Ah, cemetery boner humor! That's how you know this is art.
The movie has only just started, but there never turns out to be a whole lot more plot than that. The witches take over the girls (but not Colleen for a while, since she is the hero's girlfriend's sister), and Abbadon takes over Ramsden, and Lutz, Garner, and Will try to figure out what happened with the now-dead frat guys. Jump forward an hour, and Will stops the witches from winning. There's a portal to hell on campus - man, these Catholic schools have everything - and a simply ancient nun who seems to know all about where it is and how to protect it, Sister Seraphina (Anita Page, who has fallen quite a long way in the 71 years since she co-starred in the Best Picture Oscar winner The Broadway Melody - though I'll be honest, I had a much better time watching Sisters in Blood), and there's a bit of a race to see whether Will or the sisters will get that information first. Mostly, though, we just get scene upon scene upon scene of witch-Maria and witch-Keri swanning about with gleefully melodramatic ferocity, often doing so naked. It speaks to the movie's priorities, as well as its quantity of good taste, that the literally second Keri has been taken over, she and Maria start stripping each other's clothes off and making out. So, incestuous lesbian witch sisters, on top of everything.
This is barbarically shitty stuff, but that ends up being its saving grace. I would not hesitate for a moment to say that Sister in Blood has the worst acting of any Witchcraft thus far, and St. Lawrence in particular is just a world class disaster of a screen performer. Ford's dialogue isn't helping anybody out at all - there are a lot of expository lines of dialogue that feel like they've been welded together from three or four independent clauses - but St. Lawrence has a peerless amateur quality, the thing that non-actors do where they REALly over- EMPHasize stressed SYLlables - AND not alWAYS the corRECT syllables - because that is whence drama comes, or something. And it's not just that, it's also that she's wearing this massive shit-eating grin the whole time, and waggling her eyebrows like a skin-flick version of Groucho Marx. It's irresistibly terrible, and it makes the sisters' pantomime villain work so much better to have it founded upon such a wildly out-of-control bit of scenery chewing as this.
So, as I said: silly. The whole thing feels like a great dumb lark, as long as Lutz and Garner aren't onscreen (they're just shrill, cynical assholes who are unpleasant to sit with for any length of time at all), both because the ineptitude is adorable and the plot is such a random collage of witchy moments. There is a scene where Maria and Keri try to get a priest to give up the key to the portal to hell by sexually assaulting him, and the actor playing the priest (David Allan Graf, I think) plays the reaction as a big petulant kid, crying like his mom just told him no more cookies. Later, the monsignor of the school (Joseph P. Haggerty) avoids the witches' evil ways by, with stately dignity flinging himself off a roof like, well, like a mannequin in a cassock.
It's pretty much wall-to-wall zany shit, and the fact that it has such a steady stream of nudity after two consecutive entries where the pornographic elements were frontloaded adds to the chipper, bouncy feeling. If you will. Plus, Sisters in Blood is the first time in forever that a Witchcraft movie has actually been in any meaningful way a horror film, and not just softcore where some of the characters are Satanists. There is actually some stage blood this time, something we haven't seen in ages and ages; Abbadon briefly appears in the form of a relatively respectable CGI effect (which is the more respectable, to be sure, for being brief). And when the witch-sisters' ghosts manifest to take over the girls' bodies, they do so in the form of these nasty-looking zombie-like creatures with glowing red eyes. It's not really much at all, but it is something, and it's nice to get the feeling that the creators of a Witchcraft picture actually care in some way about the integrity of the object they're trying to make - a feeling that also extends to this movie's unexpected respect for series continuity, such as it is, and Will's personal history, such as it is. It is, by every imaginable yardstick, a terrible piece of shit that couldn't be dumber if it tried; but it's the most watchable terrible piece of shit this franchise has produced in some long while, and eleven entries in, that's not to be taken for granted.
Reviews in this series
Witchcraft (Spera, 1988)
Witchcraft II: The Temptress (Woods, 1989)
Witchcraft III: The Kiss of Death ("Tillmans" [Feldman], 1991)
Witchcraft IV: The Virgin Heart (Merendino, 1992)
Witchcraft V: Dance with the Devil (Hsu, 1993)
Witchcraft 666: The Devil's Mistress (Davis, 1994)
Witchcraft 7: Judgement Hour (Girard, 1995)
Witchcraft VIII: Salem's Ghost (Barmettler, 1996)
Witchcraft IX: Bitter Flesh (Girard, 1997)
Witchcraft X: Mistress of the Craft (Cabrera, 1998)
Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood (Ford, 2000)
Witchcraft XII: In the Lair of the Serpent (Sykes, 2004)
Witchcraft 13: Blood of the Chosen (House, 2008)
Witchcraft XIV: Angel of Death (Palmieri, 2016)
Witchcraft XV: Blood Rose (Palmieri, 2016)
Witchcraft XVI: Hollywood Coven (Palmieri, 2016)
Categories: good bad movies, horror, needless sequels, porn, satanistas
