Was there a writers strike in Italy in the late-'80s?* That's the only way I can explain the virtually non-existent plots of many an Italian horror film from that era. The script for Streghe (AKA Witch Story) could be written on the back of a stamp, and summed up in just three words: witch, curse, deaths.
The film starts with the burning of a witch, who places a curse on her persecutor's descendants. As she dies, her young daughter throws herself out of a window (the first of many people to be launched through glass in this film). Cut to the present, and a brother and sister invite a group of friends to the house that they have just inherited, unaware that the place used to be home to the witch and is now haunted. The group's partying (which includes one of the girls performing a sexy tabletop striptease for her friends!) comes to an end when they start to die in inexplicable and gruesome ways.
Any semblance of a rational story is soon forgotten, as director Alessandro Capone focusses on delivering titillation from the pretty girls and a handful of death scenes; however, director Capone repeatedly wimps out, the young ladies only stripping as far as their underwear, and his kills bloody but lacking in imagination. Almost everyone crashes through a pane of glass at some point, and, in the film's dumbest moment, a possessed girl emerges from under the surface of a swimming pool brandishing a revving chainsaw.
3/10
*It's hard to believe, but, according to IMDb, there were actually three writers responsible for this mess.
