Review of Witchcraft (Evil Encounters) (1988) by Vincent O — 28 Jun 2011

An unholy, unintentionally hilarious mess of a flick starring Linda Blair and David Hasselhoff and demonstrating perfectly why the latter never became a household name in horror. Supplement this with a starring role for Leslie Cumming, who delivers a performance so perfectly awful that I thought she was a foreign actress delivering her lines phonetically, and you've just about hit the trifecta. Now throw in a child actor who never made another film or TV appearance, a truly bumbling director (Michael Newlin and Fabrizio Laurenti are the same person), an unbelievably corny script, awful prosthetics that frequently look like they might pop off the wearer at any moment, and scenes in which day turns to night and back again up to 8 times, and it's a so-bad-it's-fun romp through something that you can only scrub out with plenty of bleach.

The phrase that most often came to mind for me was, "What were they thinking?" Did they really think that nobody would notice the fake lips being sewn together were made of some sort of hard wax? That when we saw out of a window it was night, but when the shot switched to an interior that it was clearly daytime in the same window? That the nails that came off of a woman's fingers were back on them again a moment later? Really?

It's worth noting that the director and most of the cast's careers ended here. Linda Blair still worked in a few B flicks, Hasselhoff simply won't go away, and one other actress has appeared in various TV dramas in bit parts. The rest? Gone. Truly terrible stuff here. If you like really bad horror film disasters, you're gonna love this one.