Entry 88: Witchery (AKA Evil Encounters-1988)

Witchery (AKA Evil Encounters-1988)

Dir: Fabrizio Laurenti

"A nightmare possession, horrific satanic rites and a gruesome sacrifice."



Basement MVP Linda Blair is back, baby, and this time she's got the Hoff riding shotgun!  If you're not on board already, get out of my basement and go fuck yourself.  Those of you who are still here, sit back, get cozy and settle in for a night of Witchery!

David Hasselhoff (TV's Knight Rider and Baywatch) is photographer Gary, who's come to a small New England island with virginal girlfriend Leslie (Leslie Cumming, Killing Birds), a writer who is working on a book on a local witchcraft legend.  Horny-as-shit Gary can't stop "Hassel"ing Leslie to jump in the sack, calling her twentysomething virginity "unnatural."  Gary and Leslie keep witnessing strange prismatic lights around their spooky old hotel, which Leslie attributes to witchcraft, and a creepy old woman (Hildegard Knef, a LONG way from her appearances in classics like The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Dirty Dozen) is lurking about the premises.  Linda shows up as Jane, a pregnant Bostonian woman who is plagued by nightmares of witches being persecuted.  Jane glimpses one of the prisms and, in a scene that has to be seen to be believed, gets sucked down the drain of a dirty bathtub through a Laser Floyd-like vortex and winds up in hell, where she witnesses two old folks roasting and eating a GODDAMN FETUS while Knef skulks around and laughs.  A convenient storm arrives, and Gary, Leslie, Jane, Jane's parents and little brother and real estate agents Linda (Soap star Catherine Hickland) and Jerry wind up trapped in the hotel together.  Soon, Blair's mom gets sucked into the hell vortex and has her lips graphically sewn shut (this sequence features VERY good makeup effects and is legitimately tough to watch); she's then stuffed in the fireplace and burned alive when her (unknowing) family and friends start a fire to keep warm ("That wood sure smells funny!").  Linda and Jerry get zapped to hell when they slink off for some intense, haunted hotel fucking; she's garroted until unconscious, then impaled through the neck on a mounted swordfish (!) and he ends up crucified and burned on an upside-down cross.  Leslie dreams of being raped by a lipless demon, then awakens to find her hymen broken, and Blair's dad hemorrhages uncontrollably from his neck until he bleeds to death.  Anyway, it turns out that Knef is actually an emissary from hell, and she's chosen each of our victims based on their correlation to one of the seven deadly sins.  She ends up possessing Blair through her unborn child, heroic Hoff gets messily impaled and Blair gets to homage her own The Exorcist  by killing herself during a moment of clarity by throwing herself out of a window.  In the final scene, Leslie makes it out only to realize she's become pregnant by her demon-dream...

I have to be honest, I set out to rip this movie a new one; why did it have to be so fucking likable?  Witchery is everything you'd expect/want from a low-budget, late 80s Italian horror flick!  It grabs shamelessly from The Exorcist, The Sentinel, The Beyond, The Evil Dead and The Shining, but director Laurenti is thoroughly incapable of replicating any of the artistry or enthusiasm of those classics.  That said, it's impossible to hate a film that so brazenly rips off so many genre mainstays, casts both Blair (who seems bored during most of the film, but seems to be having a blast once possessed!) and Hasselfhoff (who plays meathead Gary exactly the way you'd want/expect him to) AND features some top-notch, over-the-top gore effects.  Witchery has nothing new to say, and will likely have no place in the pantheon of horror greats, but I implore you to toss it in the player and have a couple beers with some horror aficionado friends...I guarantee you'll have a blast!