Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood

The acting seemed cardboard like, as were the characters. The story seemed unbelievable in almost every fashion. There are many other movies with similar ideas out there more worth your time. "To the lions for this one"!

I love the Witchcraft series! They have everything a bad horror series needs! Death, sex, nudity, bad acting, bad writing, and bad directing. Oh! And the beautiful Stephanie Beaton! God, this woman is beautiful! I found this movie to be gorier then the others for some reason. But I credit that to Ron Ford(who also played the killer in The Bagman!) One thing that did p*** me off, was that this movie had more sex scenes than any of the others! I definitely think this series has become total soft-core porn! They definitely need to retire this series!

Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood (2000)

** (out of 4)

Three college girls are putting on a production of MacBeth when they decide to become witches and help a demon find a key that will open the gateway to Hell. Lucky for the world that one of the girls has a sister that is dating the one and only Will Spanner (James Servais). This eleventh film in the series gets a higher than normal rating from me but please don't think it's because this is a better made movie or anything like that. No, this here is just as bad as the previous ten entries but this one here is so laughably bad that I couldn't help but have a good time with it. I've seen a great number of movies and I really can't think of a film where rape is funny. The subject is ugly and I'm really ashamed to say this but there's a rape scene here that's actually funny and it's when two of the witches rape a priest who is crying and begging for his virginity. The scene is obviously so wrong but at the same time the priest's performance is so bad that you can't help but laugh. This film also offers up other hilarious performances and just check out the "acting" towards the end when the three girls are walking off and the crowd of heroes are reacting to them. This film also manages to be a tad bit gorier than previous entries and we even get some violent face ripping and stabbing to the eyes. As for nudity, there's quite a bit here but the majority of it comes from people you really don't want to see naked. Stephanie Beaton returns as Detective Lutz and her scene at the end where she's being sexually attacked is something you've got to see to fully believe. Kathleen St. Lawrence plays the main witch here and while her acting wasn't the greatest, I thought she was incredibly cute and I noticed that this was her only film credit, which leads me to believe she found other ways of making money other than taking her clothes off for an eleventh film in a series. Again, WITCHCRAFT XI is a bad movie but thankfully it's bad enough to make you laugh and keep you entertained.

I am one of an increasing aficionados of this series. Having abandoned quality after the first one the series has opted for repeating a formula with usually increasing flesh and hoping that word of mouth and shear deluge of films will make money. The trick has largely worked. I found out about this via an occult and a vampire website where the stage and screen actor Stephen Armourae listed them as minor films with a particular interest, some of the actresses have appeared in sketches by him as well. In this lot thats bare flesh and bad acting. Steve is clearly unimpressed that the word Witchcraft should be attached to this lot: he is an occultism and has written on wicca. OK so here's the deal: Will Spanner returns, continuously since Witchcraft 2, with the delightful if too peroxide Delia Sheppard, here with his fiancé Kelly Jordan who for the sake of the script has not met people she appeared with in previous films. That's not a good sign for a film. The thrust of this one is that Kelly's sister and 3 attractive students can't act better than mahogany and they will murder Macbeth. So they are encouraged to perform a supposed witchcraft ritual to give authenticity to their performances. Gate of Hell inevitably opens and everyone gets their clothes off. This is not rated highly compared to the others in the series by Armourae either. But the sound is better and Anita Page is a bonus: a silent star aged 90 giving this a poignancy it doesn't deserve.

Witchcraft 10 ended with LAPD Detective Lutz returning home from England, with the papers necessary to join Interpol's Bureau 17 if she wished. In this one, there's no mention of that, so it seems she chose not to do so. She's reunited with her partner Garner, who had stayed home during her trip, as well as her short skirts and high heels.

Will Spanner is back, with his fiancé Kelly Jordan. I'm supposing this is his girlfriend Keli of parts 5, 6, 7, and 9. However, she doesn't seem to remember having met Lutz and Garner before, or having learned of Will's witchcraft skills, which Keli had. Will and Kelly go to visit her atheist sister Colleen at the Catholic college where she is studying drama.

Colleen is rehearsing for a role as one of the three witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth "Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble." In fact, writer/director Ron Ford said his original title for this was Witchcraft XI: The Weird Sisters. Their professor is not pleased with how they perform it, and he and the most assertive of the three women, Keri Burston, feel they should go to a ceremony and perform a real witchcraft ceremony to lend their performance credibility. There, they will try to revive three sisters who'd been executed for witchcraft who had tried to conjure Abaddon and open a gate to hell.

The ceremony gives them all an opportunity (one of many) to take their tops off. Naturally, they're spied upon by three horny college guys, and when one of them dies, Detective Lutz and Garner show up to investigate. Meanwhile, the redheaded would-be Shakespearean Maria Fitzwater becomes possessed by one of the witch sisters.

Things get worse, and Will and Kelly try to save Colleen, while Lutz and Garner continue to investigate. There's a lot of nudity in this one, from Kelly, the three lovely young college students (I was surprised this appears to be the only film any of the three have been in), and Lutz. There's considerably more blood and gore than most entries in the series, including a face chomping, and someone being torn limb from limb.

Certainly not a great movie by any measure, but fairly entertaining, and I've found them to grow on me a bit the more titles in the series I see. Acting in this one isn't as bad as in some of the other later titles. There's a curious cameo by early film star Anita Page as a nun who knows something about the three witches; IMDb's page for her has a number of photos of her from the '20s and '30s. The sound is definitely better, with the dialogue being pretty clear at all times, whereas in some others it was poorly recorded or drowned by the soundtrack.