That's "archangel" to you, monkey boy
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 to have the good sense to realise that this was a great place to take their final bows. That film was unmistakably built as a series finale, wrapping up all of the loose ends that had gone unraveled over the previous 20 years, and even acting like there had been an ongoing character arc that needed to reach a conclusion. And for eight years, it even looked like a series finale. At some point, however, David S. Sterling, producer of Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood and Witchcraft XII: In the Lair of the Serpent, decided that the time was ripe to haul the franchise back out into the sunlight - my romantic belief is that he recognised that literally the only thing that the Witchcraft movies had to recommend themselves was the whole "longest-running horror series" thing, and in the first half of the 2010s, it was starting to look like the Friday the 13th series was about to log its own thirteenth entry.* So Witchcraft needed to do something to secure its record.
What Sterling ended up producing, whatever the motivation, wasn't just a new Witchcraft movie: it was three new Witchcraft movies, all filmed in one production block in less than two weeks by the same cast and crew under the same director, David Palmieri (though they were all handed off to different post-production teams, the better to make sure they could all be released more or less simultaneously). The result was a self-contained trilogy within the greater run of the franchise, one with recurring characters and plotlines and all. Or so I am told. My initial impulse was to honor the quickie production by watching and reviewing all three films in one go, but 4.5 uninterrupted hours of Witchcraft sounded too terrifying for words. So for right now, we're just looking at the first leg of the trilogy: Witchcraft XIV: Angel of Death, which is one of those "back to basics" stories that the franchise trotted out every now and then, and that makes sense for a place to start this profoundly ill-advised exercise in brand extension.
The basics being: people are dying in Los Angeles, a coven of witches led by a demon trying to take over the world are responsible, and detectives Lutz (Bernadette Perez, AKA Berna Roberts) and Garner (Leroy Castanon) are tasked with stopping them. Screenwriter Keith Parker even has a little fun with how rudimentary this is: when we first find the detectives - he's peeing, she's rolling her eyes - they're in the middle of complaining how unlikely it is that they somehow manage to keep getting the bullshit paranormal cases, instead of the nice simple human murders and other lowlifes that their colleagues get to hunt down. But I am jumping ahead: we catch up with the indefatigable Lutz and Garner only after we've seen some evidence of witchcraft (which, keep in mind, we do not actually see in every Witchcraft picture, so that's a plus). Rose (Molly Dougherty) is grousing because her ex (I'm not sure that I caught his name, but "Thom", played by Chris Petrillo, is the only leftover man in the cast) has started dating a new woman, Jenny (Angelita Franco), and Jenny is being over-the-top nasty about it, going so far as to send Rose a weirdly antagonistic, provocative letter. And this makes Rose so angry that she spontaneously sends a death curse towards the couple. And she had not intention at all of doing this; her latent witch powers are just suddenly that strong.
And the actual first thing we see is the couple fucking, because the people making Angel of Death know what the point is of the Witchcraft series, and it's not horror, storytelling, character, atmosphere, theme, or striking visuals. I mean, I suppose a topless woman is a kind of striking image, but not the way I'm talking about.
(Or even before that, the first thing we see is a uniquely cruddy opening credits sequence, even for a series that has made cruddy opening credits sequences an art form: the Witchcraft title card has been copied from one of the earlier entries, when they were still at 1.33:1, so we get a pillarboxed image right in the midst of the credits. And then every single cast and crew member, individually, is given a title treatment using 3-D rendered text zooming in on itself so it flips around. It takes four goddamn minutes).
So yes, Rose kills the couple, right smack in the middle of coitus, with Franco being quite the trouper as she flails her head around like a rag doll to make sure the blood packet in her mouth just really gets all over the place. And this puts the young witch on the radar of a group of white witches and yoga enthusiasts working under the guidance of white warlock/yogi Samuel (Jeremy Sykes). He send his trusted student Sharon (Noël VanBrocklin) to bring Rose to the yoga studio, hiding the paranormal aspect of all this for the time being, and if there was any doubt at all that Samuel and his coven are up to no good, VanBrocklin's first appearance would put it to bed. She is mesmerisingly terrible, by which I in part mean that she's so droning and lifeless that watching her act is a somewhat trancelike, soporific experience. And this is, to be sure, mostly just a bad performance, but there's a difference between a bad performance that's meant to be kind, and a bad performance that's meant to foreshadow that the character is malicious, and VanBrocklin's specific flavor of flat disaffect is disaffected in the direction - or, that is to say, not in the direction - of haughty cruelty.
So anyways, Lutz and Garner are investing Jenny and Thom's deaths, and they quickly stumble across the yoga studio, in part because warlock lawyer Will Spanner (Ryan Cleary) gets involved, on behalf of an actual white witch who has already been suspicious of Samuel. It is not clear this time around that Will is still a lawyer. It's even less clear that his awakening as a powerful warlock at the end of Blood of the Chosen has taken hold even a little bit. Also, kudos to everybody involved in making Angel of Death: this is the 12th film in the series with an adult Will, and while we haven't exactly been swinging from peak to peak, we are incontestably at the very worst Will yet: Cleary plays the character with a petulant squawk, and he's not even trying to win the battle to hold more attention than the veneer of eyeshadow he's been caked with, nor the spiked hair and V-neck shirts. The whole package exudes the horrible aura of some dreadful Angelino himbo whose glory years are a decade in the past, but who has decided that he will fight aging by clinging to a years-out-of-date conception of what is "hip" until you can practically see the sweat forming. And if that's what the movie wants us to think of Will, then okay, but I can't imagine it's what the movie wants. It's deeply unwatchable, anyways.
So there's our boilerplate plot, on the one hand; on the other, the film spends a considerable, even surprising amount of time just vibing with its yoga witches, Rose, Sharon, and fellow new recruit Tara (Zamra Dollskin). These scenes are blatantly present to shove the movie up past the 80-minute mark, and they serve effectively no narrative function; and this in one of the rare Witchcrafts that actually has enough narrative for there to be a function to serve. Even so, these scenes are by far my favorite part of the film. There's a loopy kind of energy that comes to play, because all three of Dougherty, VanBrocklin, and Dollskin are quite terrible, but they're all terrible in entirely different ways. VanBrocklin, I've mentioned, is basically asleep, stumbling across her lines in a nasal mumble that carries not a trace of emotional tone. Dollskin - a fetish model, leather designer, and performance artist (she's saddled with an entirely unmotivated shower scene that's the only other moment after the opening when Angel of Death remembers that it's the 14th entry in a softcore porn franchise) - is as energetic as a bunny rabbit, delivering her lines at 110% and opening her eyes so wide one fears they might pop out of her skull. She is easily the most appealing person in the movie outside of Perez, for opposite reasons: Perez is actually kind of giving a performance, while Dollskin is basically just exuding pure amateur enthusiasm, the bright energy of a non-actor who almost makes up in "you guys I'm in a mooo-vee!" vitality for how stunningly bad she is at acting. Anyway, in between VanBrocklin and Sollskin, Dougherty is the lukewarm oatmeal of the group, giving a perfectly functional, perfectly boring performance that somehow attains a level of weirdness from the contrast with her costars.
This is the opposite of something that makes Angel of Death a "good" movie, but Witchcraft XIV pretty obviously had already closed off the possibility of being "good" just by existing. And what we get instead is a somewhat "watchable" movie, which is something I genuinely had not assumed was possible. A years-later exhumation of a franchise that took much too long to die in the first place should have resulted in unimaginable depths, but Angel of Death almost feels like a real production: neither the video nor the audio are liabilities, the story makes sense and develops across coherent scenes. And as long as the miserable sucking vortex of Middle Aged Goth Will is kept off-camera, the cast gives it a little forward momentum. "This isn't the worst-case scenario" is no kind of praise, but this should have been the worst-case scenario, so I'll take it.
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)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*As it turned out, a new Friday the 13th ended up getting stuck in development hell for years, with no end in sight as of 2022. Indeed, 2022's Halloween Ends, when it comes out, will beat it to the punch as the 13th movie in its own series.
What Sterling ended up producing, whatever the motivation, wasn't just a new Witchcraft movie: it was three new Witchcraft movies, all filmed in one production block in less than two weeks by the same cast and crew under the same director, David Palmieri (though they were all handed off to different post-production teams, the better to make sure they could all be released more or less simultaneously). The result was a self-contained trilogy within the greater run of the franchise, one with recurring characters and plotlines and all. Or so I am told. My initial impulse was to honor the quickie production by watching and reviewing all three films in one go, but 4.5 uninterrupted hours of Witchcraft sounded too terrifying for words. So for right now, we're just looking at the first leg of the trilogy: Witchcraft XIV: Angel of Death, which is one of those "back to basics" stories that the franchise trotted out every now and then, and that makes sense for a place to start this profoundly ill-advised exercise in brand extension.
The basics being: people are dying in Los Angeles, a coven of witches led by a demon trying to take over the world are responsible, and detectives Lutz (Bernadette Perez, AKA Berna Roberts) and Garner (Leroy Castanon) are tasked with stopping them. Screenwriter Keith Parker even has a little fun with how rudimentary this is: when we first find the detectives - he's peeing, she's rolling her eyes - they're in the middle of complaining how unlikely it is that they somehow manage to keep getting the bullshit paranormal cases, instead of the nice simple human murders and other lowlifes that their colleagues get to hunt down. But I am jumping ahead: we catch up with the indefatigable Lutz and Garner only after we've seen some evidence of witchcraft (which, keep in mind, we do not actually see in every Witchcraft picture, so that's a plus). Rose (Molly Dougherty) is grousing because her ex (I'm not sure that I caught his name, but "Thom", played by Chris Petrillo, is the only leftover man in the cast) has started dating a new woman, Jenny (Angelita Franco), and Jenny is being over-the-top nasty about it, going so far as to send Rose a weirdly antagonistic, provocative letter. And this makes Rose so angry that she spontaneously sends a death curse towards the couple. And she had not intention at all of doing this; her latent witch powers are just suddenly that strong.
And the actual first thing we see is the couple fucking, because the people making Angel of Death know what the point is of the Witchcraft series, and it's not horror, storytelling, character, atmosphere, theme, or striking visuals. I mean, I suppose a topless woman is a kind of striking image, but not the way I'm talking about.
(Or even before that, the first thing we see is a uniquely cruddy opening credits sequence, even for a series that has made cruddy opening credits sequences an art form: the Witchcraft title card has been copied from one of the earlier entries, when they were still at 1.33:1, so we get a pillarboxed image right in the midst of the credits. And then every single cast and crew member, individually, is given a title treatment using 3-D rendered text zooming in on itself so it flips around. It takes four goddamn minutes).
So yes, Rose kills the couple, right smack in the middle of coitus, with Franco being quite the trouper as she flails her head around like a rag doll to make sure the blood packet in her mouth just really gets all over the place. And this puts the young witch on the radar of a group of white witches and yoga enthusiasts working under the guidance of white warlock/yogi Samuel (Jeremy Sykes). He send his trusted student Sharon (Noël VanBrocklin) to bring Rose to the yoga studio, hiding the paranormal aspect of all this for the time being, and if there was any doubt at all that Samuel and his coven are up to no good, VanBrocklin's first appearance would put it to bed. She is mesmerisingly terrible, by which I in part mean that she's so droning and lifeless that watching her act is a somewhat trancelike, soporific experience. And this is, to be sure, mostly just a bad performance, but there's a difference between a bad performance that's meant to be kind, and a bad performance that's meant to foreshadow that the character is malicious, and VanBrocklin's specific flavor of flat disaffect is disaffected in the direction - or, that is to say, not in the direction - of haughty cruelty.
So anyways, Lutz and Garner are investing Jenny and Thom's deaths, and they quickly stumble across the yoga studio, in part because warlock lawyer Will Spanner (Ryan Cleary) gets involved, on behalf of an actual white witch who has already been suspicious of Samuel. It is not clear this time around that Will is still a lawyer. It's even less clear that his awakening as a powerful warlock at the end of Blood of the Chosen has taken hold even a little bit. Also, kudos to everybody involved in making Angel of Death: this is the 12th film in the series with an adult Will, and while we haven't exactly been swinging from peak to peak, we are incontestably at the very worst Will yet: Cleary plays the character with a petulant squawk, and he's not even trying to win the battle to hold more attention than the veneer of eyeshadow he's been caked with, nor the spiked hair and V-neck shirts. The whole package exudes the horrible aura of some dreadful Angelino himbo whose glory years are a decade in the past, but who has decided that he will fight aging by clinging to a years-out-of-date conception of what is "hip" until you can practically see the sweat forming. And if that's what the movie wants us to think of Will, then okay, but I can't imagine it's what the movie wants. It's deeply unwatchable, anyways.
So there's our boilerplate plot, on the one hand; on the other, the film spends a considerable, even surprising amount of time just vibing with its yoga witches, Rose, Sharon, and fellow new recruit Tara (Zamra Dollskin). These scenes are blatantly present to shove the movie up past the 80-minute mark, and they serve effectively no narrative function; and this in one of the rare Witchcrafts that actually has enough narrative for there to be a function to serve. Even so, these scenes are by far my favorite part of the film. There's a loopy kind of energy that comes to play, because all three of Dougherty, VanBrocklin, and Dollskin are quite terrible, but they're all terrible in entirely different ways. VanBrocklin, I've mentioned, is basically asleep, stumbling across her lines in a nasal mumble that carries not a trace of emotional tone. Dollskin - a fetish model, leather designer, and performance artist (she's saddled with an entirely unmotivated shower scene that's the only other moment after the opening when Angel of Death remembers that it's the 14th entry in a softcore porn franchise) - is as energetic as a bunny rabbit, delivering her lines at 110% and opening her eyes so wide one fears they might pop out of her skull. She is easily the most appealing person in the movie outside of Perez, for opposite reasons: Perez is actually kind of giving a performance, while Dollskin is basically just exuding pure amateur enthusiasm, the bright energy of a non-actor who almost makes up in "you guys I'm in a mooo-vee!" vitality for how stunningly bad she is at acting. Anyway, in between VanBrocklin and Sollskin, Dougherty is the lukewarm oatmeal of the group, giving a perfectly functional, perfectly boring performance that somehow attains a level of weirdness from the contrast with her costars.
This is the opposite of something that makes Angel of Death a "good" movie, but Witchcraft XIV pretty obviously had already closed off the possibility of being "good" just by existing. And what we get instead is a somewhat "watchable" movie, which is something I genuinely had not assumed was possible. A years-later exhumation of a franchise that took much too long to die in the first place should have resulted in unimaginable depths, but Angel of Death almost feels like a real production: neither the video nor the audio are liabilities, the story makes sense and develops across coherent scenes. And as long as the miserable sucking vortex of Middle Aged Goth Will is kept off-camera, the cast gives it a little forward momentum. "This isn't the worst-case scenario" is no kind of praise, but this should have been the worst-case scenario, so I'll take it.
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)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*As it turned out, a new Friday the 13th ended up getting stuck in development hell for years, with no end in sight as of 2022. Indeed, 2022's Halloween Ends, when it comes out, will beat it to the punch as the 13th movie in its own series.
