Witchcraft DVD

Once a stalwart of the ex-rental bin, Witchcraft is a sustained riff on Rosemary's Baby with a conventional bit of colonial curse business thrown in. It opens with a pair of witches being burned in Puritan New England, a warlock and his pregnant wife, intercutting the mob justice (in point of fact, witches in America were hanged not burned) with a modern-day woman, Grace (Anat Topol-Barzilai), giving birth. With her new baby, Grace moves into the mansion of her blow-dried yuppie husband (Gary Sloan) and his sinister mother (Mary Shelley, no relation) only to find the... place equipped with a hulking mute butler, a haunted mirror and sundry cheap phenomena. When a priest calls to see the baby, he is sick at the sight of the little fellow and then develops a severe case of boils that leads to him hanging himself in front of the heroine. It's not hard to spot the villains behind the conspiracy, and things wind up in the attic with a lively round of decapitations, disembowelments, burnings and sacrifices. Competently directed by Robert Spera, with adequate performances from a no-name cast, a droning synth score and some gruesome moments, it's a thoroughly ordinary picture, no better or worse than hundreds of others. The big mystery is how this 1988 title managed to spin off no fewer than ten sequels, up to the 2000 release Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood. --Kim Newman [show more]

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