What if I were killed? Who would run the witchcraft yoga studio?
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 direct-to-video horror picture. Blood Rose is a messy wreck, barely holding together (if indeed it does hold together), and desperately flop-sweaty in its attempt to translate about 10 minutes of dramatic content into about 80 minutes of movie.
The flop sweat starts a-dripping early: despite this premiering basically simultaneously with its immediate predecessor and designed to be watched in a block, Blood Rose starts with a fairly lengthy recap of the end of Angel of Death, re-running entire scenes from that movie with just a little bit added in to give us slightly more narrative context, and by "narrative context", I mean "topless women engaged in frottage". For that will be one of the main points of distinction for Blood Rose: it's super-porny again. And thank God for it, because this is only just barely endurable with the application of ample quantities of sleazy, pointless, prurient nudity. Without those things, all that would be left, I have to assume, would be the most miserable kind of forced drudgery (and, for the record, it is damned hard to find the film online with its entire 81-minute running time intact; so the easiest version to watch is, in fact, missing all of those things, and must be indescribably horrible).
But anyway, back to the last movie's plot: Will Spanner (Ryan Cleary), warlock lawyer, is busily destroying the evil warlock posing as a good yoga instructor, Samuel (Jeremy Sykes). While this happens, Samuel's right-hand witch, Sharon (Noël VanBrocklin), suggests to new witch recruit Tara (Zamra Dollskin) that they need to generate some sex magic, the most powerful magic of all. Cue the frottage. After it's over, Tara cheerfully asks if they succeeded in killing Samuel (Tara only does things cheerfully. As was true last time, Dollskin has a lot of gung-ho enthusiasm and much less interest in actually dissecting the script in terms of story beats and character motivations). Alas, says Sharon, they were trying to save Samuel - in the hopes of giving him space to repent and redeem himself before Will blinks him out of existence, or some such quick bit of unconvincing bullshit. In a shock to tend all shocks, the evil henchman who spent all of the last movie lying will turn out to only be pretending to be a good guy in this movie. I would almost say "what's really annoying" is that Will, and cynical cops Lutz (Bernadette Peters, AKA Berna Roberts) and Garner (Leroy Castanon), apparently take her quite at her word, giving her several weeks in which to restore Samuel's evil witch yoga empire unperturbed, except that, fifteen Witchcrafts in, I can hardly pretend to be even a tiny bit surprised that Will, Lutz, and Garner are useless bozos.
So, skip a month ahead, and Sharon has made quite a success of getting the yoga studio back on its feet, with Tara as her plucky gal Friday. Meanwhile, the last film's main character - and this film's main character, even though it takes about 15 minutes for that to make itself clear - Rose (Molly Dougherty), is mostly just happy that things have settled down and she's no longer being turned into the telekinetic channel for Satanic forces to perform violent murder in the world. Sadly, this blissful state is about to come to a swift end, because Sharon plans to use her as precisely such a channel, and that's pretty much the whole movie. People die - during sex, ideally, because it's a Witchcraft film - and since "death by witchcraft, while also naked" is like a dog whistle for Lutz and Garner, they dive into investigating, spending most of their detective energy harassing prostitute Eden (Diana Prince), who served as Rose/Sharon's catspaw during the first murder. Will correctly assumes that Sharon is up to no good, but this is less because he's clever and more because he's a surly dick. After more than an hour of this, things finally come to a head, but they don't actually resolve, because director David Palmieri, producer David S. Sterling, and screenwriter Sean Abley were mere hours away from entering production on the third leg of this trilogy at the time they were shooting this second part.
Blood Rose is simply dreadful, a step down from Angel of Death in almost every way save one: Cleary was obviously finding his footing as Will Spanner, and he's a lot less smarmy and sniveling, even if he's still trapped by the godawful hair and makeup that has given him the look of a seedy middle-aged DJ with a day job selling secondhand iPhones out of his van. No other performer has improved; thankfully, nobody has gotten worse, though we have to deal with even more screentime from VanBrocklin, whose sleepy-eyed petulance continues to be some of the worst screen acting I have ever had the mystified misfortune to encounter. Tara gets a bit more to do in the story, which is all for the best, since Dollskin's upbeat energy is, while nowhere remotely in the neighborhood of conventionally good acting, at least vibrant and vital enough that she's fun to watch, rather than just crabby and sullen.
The story, meanwhile, is on par with the dullest in the whole series: not the same thing as "the worst" and the Witchcraft films do ask us to make that kind of fine distinction. The big issue is that virtually nothing whatsoever happens; Sharon keeps having Rose lie down in yoga positions (Blood Rose goes way more in on the "witches running a yoga studio" thing, and it's a lot more ludicrous as a result; maybe also "funnier", but that's really in the eye of the beholder), laying hands on her head, and swapping consciousness so she can go zap somebody with Rose's witch power. For the record, VanBrocklin's performance as Rose-in-Sharon's-body is miles better than her performance as Sharon, which means that her mushmouthed, disaffected work is an honest-to-God choice, and not just the result of a performer who has no clue to act and got the job solely because she wasn't going the filmmakers any grief about topless scenes, which had honestly been my assumption.
Anyway, we get just that scene, and basically no other content. It's not even pretending to be exciting during the close thing it has to action, the violent scenes where Sharon is weaponising Rose: the murders are accompanied by a breathtakingly awful visual distortion effect, which makes the victim's face smear out all bulbous-like. And this is easily the peak of the film's visual effects. The budget for making three films at once had to run out somewhere, and it apparently ran out at providing this 2016 all-digital production with effects that look absolutely no better than the ones plaguing its older VHS-based brothers.
The bar for the Witchcraft movies got so far that even this isn't the worst; but it's genuinely unwatchable, and only the fairly copious amount of nudity (the most of any of these since the '90s) provides even a glimmer of actual entertainment value. I was taken aback that Angel of Death was, all things considered, actually right on-par for the series, quality-wise, despite being a years-later exhumation of a franchise that was well dead, but Blood Rose is much more of the basically unwatchable haphazard dreck I was anticipating. The notion that this trilogy still has a whole movie's worth of opportunities to be even worse is bone-chilling.
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!
The flop sweat starts a-dripping early: despite this premiering basically simultaneously with its immediate predecessor and designed to be watched in a block, Blood Rose starts with a fairly lengthy recap of the end of Angel of Death, re-running entire scenes from that movie with just a little bit added in to give us slightly more narrative context, and by "narrative context", I mean "topless women engaged in frottage". For that will be one of the main points of distinction for Blood Rose: it's super-porny again. And thank God for it, because this is only just barely endurable with the application of ample quantities of sleazy, pointless, prurient nudity. Without those things, all that would be left, I have to assume, would be the most miserable kind of forced drudgery (and, for the record, it is damned hard to find the film online with its entire 81-minute running time intact; so the easiest version to watch is, in fact, missing all of those things, and must be indescribably horrible).
But anyway, back to the last movie's plot: Will Spanner (Ryan Cleary), warlock lawyer, is busily destroying the evil warlock posing as a good yoga instructor, Samuel (Jeremy Sykes). While this happens, Samuel's right-hand witch, Sharon (Noël VanBrocklin), suggests to new witch recruit Tara (Zamra Dollskin) that they need to generate some sex magic, the most powerful magic of all. Cue the frottage. After it's over, Tara cheerfully asks if they succeeded in killing Samuel (Tara only does things cheerfully. As was true last time, Dollskin has a lot of gung-ho enthusiasm and much less interest in actually dissecting the script in terms of story beats and character motivations). Alas, says Sharon, they were trying to save Samuel - in the hopes of giving him space to repent and redeem himself before Will blinks him out of existence, or some such quick bit of unconvincing bullshit. In a shock to tend all shocks, the evil henchman who spent all of the last movie lying will turn out to only be pretending to be a good guy in this movie. I would almost say "what's really annoying" is that Will, and cynical cops Lutz (Bernadette Peters, AKA Berna Roberts) and Garner (Leroy Castanon), apparently take her quite at her word, giving her several weeks in which to restore Samuel's evil witch yoga empire unperturbed, except that, fifteen Witchcrafts in, I can hardly pretend to be even a tiny bit surprised that Will, Lutz, and Garner are useless bozos.
So, skip a month ahead, and Sharon has made quite a success of getting the yoga studio back on its feet, with Tara as her plucky gal Friday. Meanwhile, the last film's main character - and this film's main character, even though it takes about 15 minutes for that to make itself clear - Rose (Molly Dougherty), is mostly just happy that things have settled down and she's no longer being turned into the telekinetic channel for Satanic forces to perform violent murder in the world. Sadly, this blissful state is about to come to a swift end, because Sharon plans to use her as precisely such a channel, and that's pretty much the whole movie. People die - during sex, ideally, because it's a Witchcraft film - and since "death by witchcraft, while also naked" is like a dog whistle for Lutz and Garner, they dive into investigating, spending most of their detective energy harassing prostitute Eden (Diana Prince), who served as Rose/Sharon's catspaw during the first murder. Will correctly assumes that Sharon is up to no good, but this is less because he's clever and more because he's a surly dick. After more than an hour of this, things finally come to a head, but they don't actually resolve, because director David Palmieri, producer David S. Sterling, and screenwriter Sean Abley were mere hours away from entering production on the third leg of this trilogy at the time they were shooting this second part.
Blood Rose is simply dreadful, a step down from Angel of Death in almost every way save one: Cleary was obviously finding his footing as Will Spanner, and he's a lot less smarmy and sniveling, even if he's still trapped by the godawful hair and makeup that has given him the look of a seedy middle-aged DJ with a day job selling secondhand iPhones out of his van. No other performer has improved; thankfully, nobody has gotten worse, though we have to deal with even more screentime from VanBrocklin, whose sleepy-eyed petulance continues to be some of the worst screen acting I have ever had the mystified misfortune to encounter. Tara gets a bit more to do in the story, which is all for the best, since Dollskin's upbeat energy is, while nowhere remotely in the neighborhood of conventionally good acting, at least vibrant and vital enough that she's fun to watch, rather than just crabby and sullen.
The story, meanwhile, is on par with the dullest in the whole series: not the same thing as "the worst" and the Witchcraft films do ask us to make that kind of fine distinction. The big issue is that virtually nothing whatsoever happens; Sharon keeps having Rose lie down in yoga positions (Blood Rose goes way more in on the "witches running a yoga studio" thing, and it's a lot more ludicrous as a result; maybe also "funnier", but that's really in the eye of the beholder), laying hands on her head, and swapping consciousness so she can go zap somebody with Rose's witch power. For the record, VanBrocklin's performance as Rose-in-Sharon's-body is miles better than her performance as Sharon, which means that her mushmouthed, disaffected work is an honest-to-God choice, and not just the result of a performer who has no clue to act and got the job solely because she wasn't going the filmmakers any grief about topless scenes, which had honestly been my assumption.
Anyway, we get just that scene, and basically no other content. It's not even pretending to be exciting during the close thing it has to action, the violent scenes where Sharon is weaponising Rose: the murders are accompanied by a breathtakingly awful visual distortion effect, which makes the victim's face smear out all bulbous-like. And this is easily the peak of the film's visual effects. The budget for making three films at once had to run out somewhere, and it apparently ran out at providing this 2016 all-digital production with effects that look absolutely no better than the ones plaguing its older VHS-based brothers.
The bar for the Witchcraft movies got so far that even this isn't the worst; but it's genuinely unwatchable, and only the fairly copious amount of nudity (the most of any of these since the '90s) provides even a glimmer of actual entertainment value. I was taken aback that Angel of Death was, all things considered, actually right on-par for the series, quality-wise, despite being a years-later exhumation of a franchise that was well dead, but Blood Rose is much more of the basically unwatchable haphazard dreck I was anticipating. The notion that this trilogy still has a whole movie's worth of opportunities to be even worse is bone-chilling.
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!
Categories: crimes against art, horror, needless adaptations, porn, satanistas
