This film starts as it means to go on: a bunch of pilgrim types, armed with pitchforks, chase a pregnant woman through a modern house (with light-switches) until she jumps out of window. We are truly in the realm of Italian madness.
David Hasselhoff plays Gary, boyfriend of the mumbling Leslie, who won’t let him into her pants. Won’t even give him tops and fingers. Gary and Leslie are currently squatting in an abandoned hotel researching either a witch or witch lights or the gates to hell or something to do with a German book. It’s kind of hard to tell, as Leslie explains most of this and to be frank she can’t act or even speak very well. I think she was the one doing the research and Gary was the one trying to get into bed with her, but nevertheless they are in trouble for two reasons. One: there’s the world’s most tired looking woman hiding in the attic somewhere, being creepy and Two: the new owners of the hotel are heading there for a visit with their children (pregnant Linda Blair and proper kid Tommy), an estate agent, and a nympho lawyer.
The old woman has already been appearing to this family for some reason and about five minutes after the family land on the island she wastes the guy who took them over in the boat. So it looks like they’re stranded.
What follows is your usual late eighties Italian set-up (like Ghosthouse, House of Lost Souls, House of Clocks etc) where a bunch of victims try not to be killed by supernatural forces. As I said it’s kind of difficult to get a handle on what’s truly going on, but it seems that the old woman (who may or may not be a ghost or a witch) wants to open the gates of hell by killing folks who have sinned in certain ways. She does this mainly by sucking them through into another dimension and wasting them graphically.
Where House of Lost Souls was content to decapitate children with washing machines, Witchcraft opts for daft visual effects and surreal, nasty deaths. One victim gets her lips sewn shut, jammed down a chimney, and set on fire. Another gets impaled on a swordfish, and in the best scene, Bob Champagne’s jugular explodes in David Hasselhoff’s face. It takes a while to get to the good stuff in this film, but the gore has an nice nasty edge to it.
Gore aside, the Italian daftness quotient is as high as ever. We don’t have dubbing, but we do have Hasselhoff telling a fully clothed woman to get dressed, a whole lot of bizarre visual trickery (like the witch-lights), and the world’s most terrified looking child actor.
A lot has been made about how bad this kid is, but to be honest with you he just looks like he’s scared of everyone in the film and would rather be anywhere else at all. I’d be scared too if I had to act with a woman who looked like she’s been drinking three bottles of vodka a day for at least a decade.
And another thing: never turn your back on Linda Blair. As usual, she goes all possessed near the end of the film in a scene that is pure comedy (unintended of course). To cement it’s place as one of the most enjoyable films an industry in decline released as the decade drew to a close, we have our twist ending which is so abrupt and stupid you just have to applaud.
Witchcraft has the lot: gore, madness, incoherence, and even a couple of scenes that are genuinely creepy (the Satan rape bit). As it seems to be unfairly trampled on by all and sundry, it turns up cheap on Amazon. For the two or three people actually interested in what Italian films were like after the golden age had passed, I’d buy Ghosthouse. Then this one.
