Witchcraft 7: Judgement Hour – review

Director: Michael Paul Girard

Release date: 1995

Contains spoilers

This is number 7 in the Witchcraft series and, to be fair, it is not a series I am familiar with. Indeed this is the first in the series that I have seen but, if this is anything to go by, I won’t be getting any more familiar with the other films anytime soon (with the possible exception of the other vampire one because I am a sad puppy and so, if I spot it cheap enough…)

The film begins at a party and we see a man walking through the crowd, later revealed to be one Martin Hussa (Loran Schmalle). Immediately we know he is evil as he is wearing a suit but has long hair in a pony tail… You know, thinking about it, I am surprised that, on the rare occasions I wear my suit, folks don’t point at me in the street and declare me evil… after all Hollywood has taught us long hair, pony tailed and suit makes you the spawn of Satan! I digress…

He walks through to a room with a girl named Rachel (Ashile Rhey) who is drinking milk. After some lame dialogue he starts to remove her clothes. Now lets make it very clear, there is a lot of nudity in this film as it was clearly easier to get an aspiring actress to strip then it was to think of a plot. Anyway, they are getting it on and there is milk play using the straw. The straw is metal and I was thinking, this could be interesting, he could kill her with the straw… nah, that would be too original; fangs and bite.

We do notice through the sequence that he reacts to her cross (I’ll come back to this later) and that during the feed a snake is crawling around. This snake appears a few times, perhaps it was meant to represent Satan (snakes always get bad press) but it isn’t actually explained.

Will Spanner (David Byrnes), attorney, is in a hospital as a friend's child has been the victim of a hit and run. Will is a warlock, hence Witchcraft one guesses, not that you’d notice. In the final showdown Martin refers to him as warlock but he is as magical as a brick. If you get this thinking 'wizards and vampires battling it out' you are going to be very disappointed (actually you’ll be disappointed anyway).

Rachel is rushed in as Will is getting his friend’s wife some water and he is dragged along by Sally (Mai-Lis Holmes), Rachel’s roommate. At this point he forgets all about his friends until later in the film when he wants some info off them, bad attorney. Rachel dies on the table.

We get to see a stake-out (and a lot of flesh iro the stake-out subject) involving cops Lutz (Alisa Christensen) and Garner (John Cragen), as a way of introducing them and then back to the hospital. Will is still watching through a window when a priest enters to give last rites but legs it when his crucifix sets on fire. Why didn’t Rachel’s do the same when Martin was near it? A little consistency would be nice. Will calls the cops, they examine the body, Rachel returns from the dead, beats everyone up and legs it.

I do want to mention that the cops and Will do catch her, and stake her, within the next few scenes, but mainly to mention her hunting technique. It is daytime and Martin only goes out at night but I guess that is fine as it is raining (thus overcast) and Rachel runs past a jogger, wooing him with the sight of her naked ass in her hospital gown. She nips off to a wooded area, he follows and uses his isotonic drink as a chat up line, strips and they get it on… 'hunting tips for vampires 101' has a new entry.

This is dire, there is a vague main plot about Martin taking over an insurance company that deals with the US blood supply to get control of it but, to be frank, I couldn’t have cared at that point and I doubt you could either.

Vampire lore things are a little sparse. There is a nicely done video of Rachel and Martin together but he doesn’t show up on the film… well it would have been nicely done if it hadn’t been for the fact that we saw his reflection earlier. He can turn into a bat as well.

Welcome to the worst excesses of crap bat syndrome. It was bad enough when it was an awful animation of a bat. However it is when we see him in bat form and they use a crap mask that looks suspiciously like a gorilla mask that has been doctored. They could have done without that.

Acting is… well there isn’t any really. Plot and dialogue are awful. This is not a good movie in any sense of the word, unless you want to see several naked ladies and there are much better vehicles for that. All in all, really bad. Sometimes a bad film has at least a redeeming feature, some are so bad they are good or have that certain illusive something that raises them well above the mire, with this I can’t even summon up a single point… 0 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.