Birth Rite

On her 18th birthday a handsome stranger reveals to Rebecca, an orphan, that she is in fact the daughter of a witch & warlock, etc, etc. The DVD cover has scream queens Julie Strain & Brinke Stevens names on it but they are mere cameos Natalie Sutherland does a reasonable job as Rebecca & takes her clothes off several times, one of the few highlights. For the girls Danny Wolske gets his pecs out, but sadly his acting ability is wooden at best. There are a few death scenes, the girl being sucked down the toilet being the best part of the movie. Otherwise, the little gore is very poor, as is the whole, stupid film.

Once upon a time, tricked by a reasonable looking front cover and the fact that it was in blockbuster, a friend and I rented this film. That day is burned in our minds forever. It is clear from the first 5 minutes that this film is rubbish. To start with, it's a stupid plot.

What I really don't get is why Rebecca suddenly starts having sex with everyone. And why she doesn't think it's weird that some warlock suddenly starts stalking her.

Then there are the "special effects". Rebecca (an "eighteen year old")sees Roman through the window "floating". He is just standing on a car. And there's a scene where everyone "disappears" by walking out of shot.

I'm not saying don't watch it. On the contrary, go and get it right now. I'm just warning you, if you are looking for a film you can believe in, this isn't it. I don't really know how to rate this. For comedy value, 10 out of 10. For a serious horror movie, 3 out of 10. What am I talking about, 3? I mean 1. No, not even that.

The best bit of this DVD is the trailer for R.O.C.C.O. Seriously.

I rent bad videos to laugh at them, I purposely look for the crappiest videos and watch them just for the humor. (A bad habit me and my friends have) This is just plain bad. I've seen a lot of "B" Rated flicks but this one is the worst one. If torture was allowed in the U.S., playing this in front of someone over and over again would be the worst to endure. I've seen better acting in my school talent show, the gore and graphics looks like the producer made a mistake with it but left it in there because they didn't have the money to re-do it, the plot is absolutely laughable and just makes you hate yourself afterwards . I recommend that anyone who finds a copy of this, destroy it immediately and tell everyone else to do the same. And I'm not exaggerating how bad this is.

You can tell by the first five minutes that the movie is going to be hard to stomach...and its not because of gore! I think this movie cost 20 bucks to make! I've seen better acting at a middle school play. I really enjoy witchcraft movies, but this didn't even feel like a witchcraft movie. A lot of things are said that are not wrapped up and seem to just come out of nowhere. You leave the movie feeling like you know less than when you started. I usually tell people when I see a bad movie that it is worth seeing at least once, but i would never submit ANYONE to this. Look at its IMDb rating and trust the comments on this one, I think I would have rather been at the dentist. I don't like telling people my movie reviews because everyone likes different things. But i think it is safe to say that this is just awful movie making. Wanna see a good movie, go rent DEMON KNIGHT!!

I guess this is the new breed of film Charles Band is going to stick to. Birthrite is released as a Shadow Entertainment release with Full Moon nowhere to be seen in the movie except on the DVD case. I heard a rumor that Charles Band was dropping the Full Moon moniker. I suppose Full Moon has become like Empire Films, it's precursor. I've seen every single Full Moon release there has ever been and I am pretty much now convinced it's all super low budget outings from here on. Hopefully there will be a small percentage of good ones in the bunch.

I was expecting maybe a witch film like "The Coven" or "Equinox Knocks" which were both very low budget, yet quite entertaining. I did like Birthrite up until about 45 minutes into the movie. It got just a little ridiculous from there until the end of the movie. It took itself way too seriously about the "Powers" that it became mostly hilarious.

If there was a high point to the film it would be the first half of the movie which had cameos by veteran scream queens Julie Strain and Brinke Stevens. Julie Strain played a stressed out high school teacher, while Brinke Stevens played the adopted mother of Rebecca.

I won't say that Birthrite is not worth watching, it is entertaining most of the time for what it is. Just don't expect a masterpiece or anything. At least it had a better overall look than the recent Shadow/Full Moon films, and seemed to have somewhat of a larger production value. Hopefully the future films from Charles Band and Shadow Entertainment will get better...