Reviewed by Jesse Miller, MoreHorror.com
Witchery - or La Casa 4 / Witchcraft: Evil Encounters - has a bit of an interesting and slightly confusing history behind it for the horror fan to soak in, for you see, when Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead came out, it was re-titled La Casa in Italy.
So after Evil Dead II came out, producer Joe D’Amato continued on with the horror film Ghosthouse (La Casa 3), which was dubbed the “unofficial Italian sequel” to Evil Dead II, despite having no connection whatsoever to that film and the storyline.
Are you still with me? Alright, so there are actually five La Casa films all up and all of them with individual horror stories that don’t connect, which leads me to the one I just watched: Witchery - an obscure and rather sadistic little horror film that up until a few days ago, I had not even heard about.
The story goes that there’s this isolated island resort that’s apparently haunted by witches and such, but the prospective buyers, that have just arrived to check this all out, know nothing at all about this.
Meanwhile, a…student of witchcraft (I assume so anyway, the film never bothers to really explain it all) named Leslie (Leslie Cumming) and her photographer boyfriend Gary (David Hasselhoff – before Baywatch) are exploring the abandoned resort for research..and stuff.
Early on, Gary’s bugging his lady friend for sex, at one point saying something along the lines of “I’m worried…no one your age should be a virgin.”
If you’re thinking to yourself “Um..what?”, yeah..that’s just the tip of the iceberg as Gary isn’t the only man to act so pigheaded over the course of this 96 minutes.
Anyway, the prospective buyers that have just arrived to the island feature a pregnant lady named Jane (Linda Blair), her young son Tommy, her overly aggressive mother, her sleaze ball father (these two are the actualprospective buyers), a religious realtor and an attractive blonde architect.
But pretty soon, a storm leaves them stranded on the island, their boatman falls victim to a witch that pops up all over the place and over the course of this one night, the group start to drop like flies one by one.
I’ll give credit where credit is due – Witchery creates a wonderful atmosphere and tops this all off with disorienting camera angles, psychedelic visuals and lengthy, sadistic sequences of gore – impressive effects and yet, uncomfortable and nasty.
But – and this is a big but– the film is a complete mess, from its incoherent narrative to its poorly sketched out characters, to its confusing sequences and ideas that are fabulous ideas but are undercooked or executed so half-heartedly that they just don’t fit.
Not to mention those loose ends that are hanging over you by the time the film wraps up. Want to know about that one plot line that was introduced but didn’t connect to anything? Forget about that!
There’s such a large mishmash of ideas here and characters shift into places so unusual that it feels like this whole plot was made up on the spot as they were shooting the thing.
Not only that, but for all its satanic elements and so forth, the climax of the film feels rushed and unfinished, which is pretty funny because that’s exactly how the characters feel – rushed just to get to the foul and uncomfortable set pieces.
There is a wealth of pretty solid material here that is built up along the way but unfortunately none of it really pays off by the time our mismatched characters get a grasp of just what it is they are dealing with.
In terms of acting, the standouts here would be David Hasselhoff and Linda Blair, the other cast of characters range from poor to terrible but let’s face it, with a script as lacking as this, they did the best with what they had to work with.
I could ramble on and on about other little scenes or story issues that bugged me but I don’t want to ruin anything for the horror fan that’s like me and wants to track this down.
So should you track down Witchery? I’m going to say YES because at the end of the day I’m glad I got to experience it because it’s all so 80’s and campy and just downright laughably bad, you know? But it’s nasty, it creates a great atmosphere and has that dizzying effect on you, that underlying uncomfortable factor that lingers long after you’ve seen it.