User reviews

The "Legendary" movie franchise returns for it's record 14th addition and it's unsurprisingly as bad as you'd expect. Making three Witchcraft movies in a single year likely didn't help matters.

All the returning characters have been recast for the umpteence time which kills any credibility this awful franchise could possibly have attained.

The excess eroticism has been dialed down somewhat and has left more room for terrible acting, dreadful sfx and more of the usual Witchcraft nonsense.

The franchise that simply doesn't know how to die doesn't get any better. The fact they have now made 14 movies and not one of them even remotely watchable is an accomplishment by itself.

The Good:

Nope

The Bad:

Everyone is recast, again!

The usual laughable sfx

Some of the worst acting yet

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

The creator must have sold his soul to the devil for real to keep this franchise going since the 80's!

I watched the 79:06 minute version on TubiTV, which might have had some scenes with nudity and sex cut, as the only such I recall is a brief medium shot near the beginning of a woman on a bed. Granted, it's not impossible I missed another due to a microsleep or stroke cause by the badness of it all.

About nine minutes are accounted for by the opening and end credits. Individual shots throughout the movie drag on needlessly. This was shot back-to-back with Witchcraft 15 and 16, and one suspects that there's really only a single bad movie's worth of material between the three, had there been better editing. Just staggeringly awful.

A deadpan young woman with huge eyes and a fake photography darkroom hobby that serves no purpose periodically inadvertently, unwittingly really curses people who make her angry. A couple detectives comment on a body that they say bled from every orifice that - as they are looking at it - clearly only bled from the mouth. Generic Hot Topic Will Spanner randomly shows up to be of little or no help every time. A yoga studio that is slightly bigger than a closet inside is the home of a coven that pretends to be a refuge for white magicians but in fact is interested in raising Kali or Samael or someone else - they seem to forget to use the same name from scene to scene. Maybe they decided it would be offensive to use Kali on top of the cultural appropriation of yoga, or to equate Hinduism with witchcraft - yet still couldn't be assed to redo that dialogue where she was already mentioned. Who knows.

Some external reviewers didn't absolutely hate this one, giving it a 3/10 or so. I can't fathom why. The average college TV production likely has better values, true even during the analog era. Perhaps if one binges the whole series with the assistance of alcohol it has an effect on the brain towards the end. But then not many have dared review the whole series anyway.

Even with 16 movies, Witchcraft isn't the longest horror series. Puppet Master is nearly there with 15, looks like and could eventually overtake it as Charles Band continues to be active. Shake, Rattle & Roll evidently ties it with 16, although SRR 16 is just a short. Troublesome Night evidently has 20 entries. Unfortunately, not all the entries of those two Asian series are all that widely available in the US or streaming internationally at present, AFAIK. The pseudo-series of Amityville movies, where they just throw the word in the title somewhere but don't deign to assign it a number (or necessarily even mention Amityville within the movie), is over fifty by some counts.

Here's an idea or two: have Witchcraft 18 (it will happen sooner or later, mark my words!) written, produced, and directed by actual practitioners of one or more forms of witchcraft, or by scholars of witchcraft history and witchcraft film history and folk horror.

The status quo might say Witchcraft equals bad, but c'mon, this one had fine audio, and pretty good visual quality too, not to mention the actors are a phenomena themselves. There's Sleepy, Emo-Will, Tara, the Evil And Totaly Not Gay Yoga Studio Master, not to mention the comedic duo of Lutz (still female) and Garner (again, after switching to Tom in movie 12). The retcon still exists, as part of the charm of the experience (starting with Garner/Tom living again).

The nudity is not strong with this one, but I'm glad Sleepy Sarah got shown, though after checking her bio I question how much of the acting was director's guidance, because she seems better than this. To the point she might not have to show the flesh.

The major problem is though is the ending, which left bad taste after an otherwise hilarious movie.

Witchcraft 14: Angel of Death (2016)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Rose (Molly Dougherty) comes home one day and notices that her mother is missing. There's a pentagram written in blood on the door and soon a couple detectives are investigating. This here leads to a deadly Satanic cult.

Several years ago I spent the month of October going through the WITCHCRAFT series, which at that time was up to number thirteen. I think most people thought the series was over but here we are with director David Palmieri bringing it back to life with not just this film but also two others. I'm not sure who wanted this series to return but I must admit that I was somewhat excited in a nostalgic kind of way.

So, was WITCHCRAFT 14 worth the wait? Well, it's better than the previous film in the series but for the most part it's nothing overly special. With that said, I'm going to give the director and writer Keith Parker a lot of credit because they've actually done a wonderful job making sure this film matches the previous ones. Usually when there's a gap in the series, the latest installments just look and feel differently but that's not the case here. From the music score to the softcore scenes, everything here is just like you remembered.

With that said, there's no doubt that the story itself isn't all that captivating and the film really struggled to hold my attention. The performances were all over the place with some really, really bad ones ranging to a couple decent. The highlight of the film has to be the two moments early on when the mother turns into a demon and speaks in a "creepy" voice. This voice had me laughing about as loud as you could hope for in a comedy! WITCHCRAFT 14 obviously isn't going to be for everyone but if you made it through the previous thirteen, why stop now?