Witchcraft (1988)

Witchcraft is the first of no less than 16 movies and that is highly impressive!It tells the story of a woman who goes to stay with her mother in law after she gives birth to her first child. Trouble is her husband and mother in law aren't what they seem and have ties to the occult.Watchcraft first of all is unforgivably boring, very little happens. I think it's doing this for the purpose of building tension but it fails miserably.When things do happen they look so poor as intended impact is lost.I do hope the franchise improves as I'm 1/16 and suffering already.The Good:The fact that the franchise lasted so long is impressiveThe Bad:Very boringUnoriginalGeneric cliched finaleThings I Learnt From This Movie:Witchcraft must get better or it wouldn't have lasted so long, right?

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.

How many Witchcraft films were there? 13? 14? I don't know, but this, the first, is not like the others. It is a repackaged Rosemary's Baby. and doesn't have the sex scenes of the later films in the Witchcraft series.This film has all the elements you would expect in a Gothic horror film: a creaky old house, mood music, a scary butler, strange dreams, and lots of screaming and blood. And, we need to mention the creepiest of them all, the Mother-in-Law.It may have been low budget, but it still was interesting and worth the time spent.

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.