Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood

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.

I rented this movie from Netflix with no high expectations and got what I expected. It's a laughably bad horror film with laughably bad acting and a laughably bad story. But this one leaned a lot towards softcore porn. B-horror movies are known to be rife with female nudity, but this movie has a naked breast in practically every scene. And this is the R-rated version! Assuming there is an unrated version, I can't imagine how much skin there'll be in that flick. As a matter of fact, without the witchcraft plot and a couple of gruesome f/x, this could be passed off as soft porn. Like soft porn, the characters find any excuse to take off their clothes and get it on.

Rather than cringe throughout the film, I just decided to have fun with it. I'm an aspiring actor, so I looked at it is an instructional video for "What Not To Do When You're Acting." I would try to take notice the moments where the actors make a facial expression, which are few and far between. So it's kind of like playing a road game where you're trying to point out every license plate from a certain state. In this case, it was like driving around New Jersey and trying to point out all the Texas license plates. I would try to compile a list of who the worst actors were and the who the best were (or lesser of evils). The laughably bad acting distracted me from the plot. Yes, it has a plot (I didn't say it's a good one, though). But whatever I was missing couldn't have been much.

Besides, when a hot, ample-breasted chick pops up topless in almost every shot, what am I doing complaining? However, the director could've made the lesbian scenes more erotic. The scenes would last pretty long, but all the girls do is kiss. And that sleep-inducing score also distracted me. Rather than having an erotic score that intensifies the eroticism of the sex scenes, we hear this cheesy elevator music which belongs in a Lifetime movie. Though I had fun with the movie, after watching it I felt like I just fried a billion brain cells. I had to watch Alfred Hitchcock's "Frenzy" afterwards to restore my brain power.

My score: 6 (out of 10)

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.

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"!

My thoughts. About this movie is that it creeps me out for than the other films with all that gore and it's whole Themes about lesbian witches.but it looks like a okay movie I mean I'm not saying it's all that bad. But I never seen a movie like this before.lots of gross elements most contain gore and such.also really need to watch these films lots them are the kind of so bad it's good films that and I'm surprise that they don't make films like this anymore.i notice that the cover for this film is similar to the one for witchcraft 9 Bitter Flesh.I mean you have a woman with a half skull face in a mini dress except this one is black.the biting scenes are very gory and disturbing in my opinion.so that's pretty much I have to said about it.