Witchcraft '88

Sometimes we wax nostalgic for the days of the VHS rental stores and how midnight viewing on HBO and Cinemax featured a lot of variety, now consumed by mainly mainstream studio stuff with kiosks sitting outside Walmart and Walgreens, along with Netflix (although, what we once could rent on dvd here has fallen victim to Long Term Wait and Save, with films we once could get very easily not as accessible as in the past) providing dvd rentals. Now you can “instant stream” instead of driving to a rental store or staying up late while the parents are asleep to catch the “naughty movie” that mommy and daddy forbid. I have to admit that I’m not at all familiar with the Witchcraft series of films that started in the late 80s and continued for (count ‘em) 13 (!) films! 13 of these movies. The mind boggles.

 I do vaguely remember the one with Julie Strain called Virgin Heart; I thing maybe this is the one that was on rotation when I would hang out at my grandmother’s house with my cousin who lived with her. They had HBO and I could swear Virgin Heart was a late night movie that came on during the 90s. I could be wrong, though, but focusing on the first film, Witchcraft (1988), it doesn’t seem to be in the same conversation as the later smutty ones. This low budget thriller seems fundamentally in the vein of the old school modern Gothic where dark secrets are unearthed by someone preyed upon by Satanists. There’s an attempt at a second chance for a couple who practiced witchcraft centuries-past to have a baby to raise as their own while disposing of the young woman who furnished them their long desired *gift*.

There’s this gratingly annoying scene where mommy-in-law, her son, and our heroine are having dinner and there’s a constant fork grinding a plate while they eat meat. It continues and I just wanted to scream. Elizabeth eats some intensely cut meat with a grin that sends off toxic rays.

John and Elizabeth Stockton were burned at the stake in the late 1600s for practicing witchcraft, disguising themselves as mother and son so that they could gain advantage over a young woman, Grace (Anat Topol) to produce them a child. Grace was just being used. The whole time, Grace’s husband actually belonged to who she believed was his mother! I thought this was funny. Backstory produced has Grace haunted by the murder of her mother by her father who thereafter hung himself. She was raised in an orphanage along with best gal pal, Linda (Deborah Scott), and later met John, thinking he was the man of her dreams. He turns out to be her worst nightmare. Her only hope might be the creepy mute Stockton butler, Ellsworth (Lee Kissman).

Satan is most powerful when he inhabits such an angel of light.

The film is really a traditional witchcraft thriller where under her own nose the heroine’s husband and his true love are making plans, and she is to be sacrificed, with her best friend and priest made examples of. Pretending the whole time, John is playing a role, displaying a supposed concerned and adoring husband to Grace. The movie never wavers in casting suspicion and this neverending sense of sinister on John’s real wife, Elizabeth, who looks the part as mommy but gives these smiles which cry aloud “I’m a wicked, wicked woman”. The first moment Mary Shelley appears, there’s never a doubt she’s pure evil. And the longer the movie shows him, Gary Sloan becomes more and more dubious and enigmatic. The priest’s *suicidal hanging* (which is mysterious and probably staged; he has this infectious skin reaction perhaps by a curse when he enters the Stockton home, posing a threat because Grace wants her baby blessed). An alter to their almighty Lucifer, the Stocktons first butcher, I guess, a cat, playing with (and eating) its heart, at the end dipping their hands in sacrificial blood and pouring it all over Grace as she is rope-tied and desperately trying to free her hands from bondage.

It is hard not for me to watch a flick like Witchcraft and not think of City of the Dead (with Christopher Lee). A young woman is enveloped by an evil that seems to reek from every orifice of the location she finds herself. Something evil just exists all around our lady and she’s unable to really see it because of her loyalty and adoration for her husband. That doesn’t change until the very last scene when, while we I figure know already, she unfortunately realizes that the man she loves has just been using her as a vessel to carry a child for him and Elizabeth and that the entire time she’s known him, their marriage and life supposedly built to last is shattered upon her discovery of their ceremony and alter. 

There’s an ambitious nature, I believe, to this particular film even if the budget and talent isn’t necessarily there to accomplish what they set out to do. It is hard to just look past the rather feeble effects but sometimes talent can overcome such weaknesses (City of the Dead proved that by being both ambitious and visually successful in evoking real dread and “gulp in the throat” suspense). Some aspects puzzle me such as how these two are still alive. And why not show Elizabeth performing some black magic when the priest gets the skin sickness and explain how he is lynched right there in the yard. Give us a ceremony and some chanting or something that provides a reasoning behind the incidents that happen. The mirror premonitions and revelations. So on and  so on..

A lot of the film spends time with Grace at the Stockton mansion, trying to adjust to her surroundings, always gravitating to a room with a long mirror that “shows her events”, like her priest perishing and facial figures, including the Stocktons themselves. A chest with trinkets that belong to either the child or Grace also draws attention. Soon a portrait of the Stocktons will gather interest from Grace and Linda in that same room. Anytime someone close to Grace gets near to the truth, he/she is dispatched accordingly.

The special effects dictate the lower-than-low budget (such as a series of hallucinogenic images that show up in the mirror, make-up effects of skin decay/disease because of black magic, and the gore as a result of those bad, bad Stocktons) and is most likely one of the main reasons Witchcraft is of such little regard (it currently has a laughable 2.6/10 on the imdb) from those who have seen it. I was expecting a movie a lot trashier and less sincere, but Witchcraft seemed designed as a serious effort regarding Grace and the possible loss of her child to Satanists who planned to get rid of her upon the discovery of their true identities. I decided early on that I wouldn’t spend my entire review smacking the film around. You want that, there are plenty of imdb reviews that systematically annihilate Witchcraft. I can only imagine, though, that the remaining 12 movies will be diabolical and that this first film will probably look like a masterpiece in comparison.