Hexenbrut

WITCHCRAFT opens centuries ago, with a man and a pregnant woman being burned at the stake. This is intercut with modern day scenes of a woman named Grace (Anat Topol) giving birth. Grace is seeing visions of the ancient couple's toasty torment, as they look increasingly like baked ziti.

Let's just say that it's a difficult delivery.

Later, Grace's husband, John (Gary Sloan), convinces her that they should move into his mother's big, spooky house. Strange occurrences start right away, with Grace experiencing dizzy spells, blackouts, and nightmares. There's also a creepy butler, and a mysterious, unused part of the house. Then, a visiting priest is reduced to something akin to a sausage left too long in the microwave! Could black magic be afoot?

Conspiratorial gloom settles in, resulting in further death and awfulness. Isn't this what all new moms hope for?

WITCHCRAFT certainly has that 1980's, supernatural movie charm going on. Though the cheeeze-level runs from medium to high, it's actually better that much of the straight-to-video sludge of the era. At least Ms. Topol is convincing in her harried role.

EXTRA POINTS FOR: #1- The sound effects during one dinner scene, making it seem as though everyone is crunching clam shells with their teeth! #2- Mom (Mary Shelley), who is so quietly malevolent! #3- The satanic "shock" finale!...

The opening of the movie intercuts a man and a woman being burned at the stake for witchcraft during colonial American times with a woman giving birth. That burning scene is repeated in a number of the sequels (more about them later).

Grace Churchill is the mother, a woman who emigrated from Poland with her parents, who died in a murder/suicide. She's a former junkie (if I heard correctly), but cleaned up and was surprised to find John Churchill one of the state's wealthiest men was interested in marrying her.

After the birth, they live with his mother in her huge house. Parts of the house are dusty, with things covered with sheets, and she's not supposed to go into that part. The family butler shows up to block it off when she tries to show it to her friend Linda. He becomes a little friendlier when given a fresh flower from the garden, and then isn't always there to guard the off-limits room.

That room has a mirror in it, in which she can briefly see colonial people, and also has visions of the future, though she's not sure she really saw them. She also has a dream, or maybe it isn't, in which she wanders outside at night and finds two people engaged in a ritual, and her mother-in-law Elizabeth is one of them. Blood drips out of Elizabeth's mouth.

The family also has a bunch of strange friends, older people who don't talk much. Grace's priest comes to the house to baptize William and he has a vision of flames, and becomes ill.

To some extent, as some have said, this borrows from Rosemary's Baby, which is certainly the better movie. There's even a steal of a famous shot of that movie, where the camera points through a doorway, partly showing a woman on a phone. However, the camera here actually does peer around, whereas in Polanski's film, the shot makes the viewer want to try to peer around.

Rosemary's Baby was followed by a little-seen and reportedly poor TV movie, Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby. Witchcraft is followed by a surprising twelve sequels so far (most of them relatively poor), though the last of them has not been released yet. Possibly the only horror series to have out-sequeled this one is the Asian anthology series Troublesome Night.

Witchcraft II picks up about eighteen years after this one, and does feature a number of flashbacks to this. Most of the sequels can stand on their own, but due to the number of flashbacks in II, it might be best to start here.

Witchcraft II also features some nudity, while there was none in this one, unless there is more than one version of the film. Some of the later Witchcraft sequels stray into erotic horror, and some feature scenes that could be considered softcore I suppose.

The main recurring character in all but two of the sequels (8 and 10) is Will Spanner, who is baby William Churchill in this one, and William Adams in the second - there's never any doubt in the movie that the baby will make it through, just what he'll be like when he gets older. Though none of them are brilliant, I don't think they're quite as bad as many others do. When in the mood for a cheap horror movie with lots of nudity, they're OK.

Witchcraft (1988)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

A mother (Anat Topol) brings her newborn son to her mother-in-law's house and sure enough the husband (Gary Sloan) and his mommy (Mary Shelley) are actually Satan worshipers wanting to make the newborn the next Antichrist. Believe it or not but WITCHCRAFT was actually a huge hit when it was released to video back in 1988 but I do wonder how many people rented this thing and could have guessed that twelve sequels would follow. Obviously, the film is just another rip-off of ROSEMARY'S BABY but we get a funny little goof in the opening credits when a title reads "Origional Screenplay by" but perhaps this error was done on purpose since the film certainly wasn't original. The film itself makes a few major mistakes in regards to a made-for-video exploitation film. The biggest is that it's pretty dull from start to finish with not much happening anywhere in the first hour. The film isn't shy about ripping off other devil-child movies so horror fans might get a few kicks out of spotting the various rips. The film really doesn't contain too much violence or blood and the real sin is that it doesn't even offer up any nudity making it quite tame all around and there's really nothing here we haven't seen much better many times before. Even those awful rip-offs from the 70s at least offered up violence, gore or nudity. The performances aren't too bad for this type of film and I'll at least give director Rob Spera credit by turning in a professional looking picture, which is something a lot of the made-for-VHS films from this era couldn't say. The film does offer up some campy moments including a priest whose face starts to mutate after entering the mother-in-law's house. Another campy moment happens with "visions" coming from a mirror, which is bound to get several laughs. Still, WITCHCRAFT doesn't have anything really going for it that separates it from the pact so there's no real need to see it.

My review was written in January 1989 after watching the film on Academy video cassette.

"Witchcraft" is an underwhelming supernatural horror piece, released direct-to-video (with video post-production and credits).

Unrelated to another new (Italian-backed) scream pic named "Witchcraft" and toplining Linda Blair, this film adds a dash of "Rosemary's Baby" to the hoary formula of a new mother's fears and the oppressive move to a gothic mansion.

Pretty Anat Topol-Barzilai is the new mother of a bouncing baby boy who haplessly finds herself moved in with a decidedly evil-seeming mother-in-law (Mary Shelley is the actress' gothic stage name) in an ancient house. She starts seeing visions, particularly in mirrors, and wisely fears for her newborn's safety. Following a burn-at-the-stake prolog, it's finally revealed that Shelley and Anat's huband Gary Sloan are reincarnated witches and they're definitely after the kid.

Pert Deborah Scott adds some life as the heroine's best pal, but pic is mainly a string of genre cliches executed by helmer Robert Spera with very little imagination. Pace slows to a crawl in the second half.

Topol-Barzilai is pleasant to look at, with her ample figure kept under wraps here even in scenes (such as human sacrifice climax) when a bit bolder approach is in order. Shelley, despite her apt name, fails at achieving a transition from menacing to out-and-out evil.

"Witchcraft" is a relatively unknown underground horror flick. Though the film has been received extremely bad reviews, it managed to spawn a total of twelve sequels (to date, at least).

The plot of the film is similar to the earlier "Rosemary's Baby". Grace Churchill has given birth to her first child, when her husband temporarily moves them in with his mother. While staying in her mother-in-laws creepy, old mansion, Grace begins experiencing bizarre incidents that lead her to believe her new family isn't what they seem.

Honestly, I'm not sure why this movie got such bad reviews from people. The only real problem I found with it was the editing style - which gives the film the look of an episode of "Murder, She Wrote". The sets of the film are quite creepy. The acting (by a primarily newcomer cast) is good. The music (though performed on a synthesizer) fits the tone of the film.

All in all, "Witchcraft" isn't an Oscar winning film, but it's a interesting way to pass 90 minutes.