So here we are, lucky number 13 - Witchcraft 13: Blood of the Chosen, to be precise. And executive producer Jerry Pfeifer (the only common link between all thirteen of those films) and the good people at Vista Street Entertainment pulled out all the stops to celebrate hitting that milestone, having become the first (and only) American horror franchise to reach thirteen numbered entries. Or they pulled out one stop, at least. The stop marked "okay, tie everything up", with the intention apparently being that Blood of the Chosen would also be the last Witchcraft picture. Something that also been tried and failed in 1995 with Witchcraft 7: Judg[e]ment Hour, which as of this point went from being "the ostensible final episode" to "the exact midway point".

Blood of the Chosen approaches the task of being a finale in a different way; rather than killing off ongoing series protagonist Will Spanner (Tim Wrobel), or doing anything else to suggest that his adventures as a Los Angeles attorney and white warlock will be coming to a close now, this entry goes in hard on continuity. It is, indeed, connecting back very directly to 1988's Witchcraft and 1989's Witchcraft II: The Temptress, back when the series was still just cranking out simply terrible direct-to-video horror movies, before it had discovered the elevated pleasures of simply terrible direct-to-video horror movies, but you see a lot of boobs. Part of what this turns out to mean is that Blood of the Chosen abandons the series' steady and not very slow move from "horror" to "horror with a lot of porny elements" to "softcore porn with some horror elements" to "softcore porn that at times references something paranormal in the dialogue". We're pretty close to just plain horror again, with lots of scenes of people having sex, but almost no sex scenes, if you follow the difference. Which would be less of a problem if the series hadn't so full descended into the realm of DTV softcore that it only had the aesthetic resources of DTV softcore at its disposal. So basically, we're watching something with the production value and acting talent of porn, but without the porn. It is, in the truest sense, the worst of both worlds.

And yet (a phrase I have probably never deployed with less enthusiasm than I am right now), and yet, there's a little bit of sparkle in Jeffrey and Michael Wolinski's screenplay. This is, whatever else we can say about it, never a lazy script. By the standards of a DTV porno so disinterested in existing that it's not even pornographic, anyways. What I mean by all of this is that it took genuine effort to go in and track down various bits & bobs of the previous 12 Witchcrafts and decide which of those felt like substantial enough gaps that it would be important to address them, and there's a certain resemblance to a terrible student who actually did the reading this time, and is so excited to turn in their smudged, misspelled, and generally inarticulate response paper. You can't really take it seriously or credit it with being successful in any of the ways you wanted it to be, but at the same time it's hard not admire the tenacity and misguided self-confidence. And I will do the Wolinskis the credit of acknowledging that got one up on me: I have at times throughout this retrospective summarised the main character's evolving collection of surnames as William Churchill Adams Spanner, but Blood of the Chosen, in a scene where it does exactly the same thing, recalls that before he was a Churchill, he was ever so briefly a Stocton, very carefully engineered to become the vector by which the ancient Stocton family of witches would bring back the devil, or whatever it was they want to do. For that matter, the Wolinskis even make a specific callback to what remains one of my absolute favorite lines of bad dialogue from the whole series, way back in The Temptress: "His father was a great warlock! And now his son will fuck me, and our child shall rule the world!"

For that matter, they've added a couple of amply worth additions to the "what? Is that dialogue? What the- what is wrong with you?" canon of Witchcraft one-liners: the confusing put-down "If I wanted to make love to a glass of water, I'd have gone to my kitchen", and the angry, muttered "Fucking Chosen One son of a bitch." Reading it, I see that the latter is more about the delivery than the line itself; but as delivered, it's a real goofy bit of nonsense.

As for the narrative attached to all of this, well "narrative" is a pretty forgiving word for it to begin with. There's a coven of witches trying to bring about the end of the world, as one will, and they do this by ripping the hearts out of men, obviously after seducing them and having clothes-on sex. I confess that I'm not quite clear on whether they actually need the hearts per se, or if they're doing this because they want to get Will's attention, and killing these men - who are themselves attuned to the same magic powers that Will was bred with - is the easiest way. It kind of seems like the latter, given that he throws himself into his customary detective work only after the witches target his buddy, Ben (Peyton Wetzel), in an early scene. He teams up with the usual pair of actual police detectives, White (Richard Flood) and Gentry (Lynn Michaels), who do almost nothing useful. He also comes into contact with Dolores (Jennifer Lafleur), who has her own investigation going on; the most useful thing this facilitates is putting him into contact with her, if you know what I mean. I mean that his penis comes into contact with her vagina. In the sex act.

Littered throughout all of this, we get little nods to this or that element of the series. Remember how for several films Will had a girlfriend, Keli, until he abruptly didn't? They broke up because he had no business trying to have a  "normal" personal life. Remember how Detective Lutz was played by a man and then later on played by a woman? Two different characters, it turns out, siblings. Remember how Will always seemed to practice a different type of law, every time we saw him? Blood of the Chosen doesn't actually explain that, but at least it admits that it was a thing that was happening, and oughtn't have.

What we don't get littered through this is anything that's actually pleasurable to watch. I think the problem here is that, over the course of 12 movies, the franchise had drifted so far into the irredeemable gutter-trash level production values of direct-to-video pornography, there was no coming back even to the awful, but relatively accomplished, level of the first three or four movies. And now the production quality couldn't support the horror elements. So, to name one example - and it's an example that shows up several times across the course of the movie - whenever the witches pull out a victim's heart, they do so by means of a cut to the victim's face while a "squish" noise is Foleyed into the soundtrack, and then the film cuts to the witch in question holding a heart and laughing. It's pretty cool and parsimonious, if you're in a high school film club. It's mortifying, if you're making a film that ostensibly cost money, and for which you are charging an audience.

But then, mortifying production values aren't new to this series. I do admit to being stymied at how they're still getting worse: the information that I've got is that Blood of the Chosen was shot in 2005 and released in 2008, but even the earlier of those dates puts it in period when prosumer cameras were getting at least good enough that you could get a decent image out of them. And in that respect, it's worth pointing out that this is the first Witchcraft film shot in widescreen, and I think even in 720p rather than standard video definition (though if you can scrounge up reliable technical specs on this series, you're doing better than me). And yet it's so much uglier even than Witchcraft XII: In the Lair of the Serpent, which presumably was shot on at least one full generation of cameras earlier. Obviously, the answer here is that when one is making the 13th entry in what was already an infamously terrible direct-to-video franchise, one doesn't try, at all. Still, it would have been nice for director Mel House and crew to have given us images that were at least lit properly. Even if we couldn't have legible recording of the dialogue - and we often cannot - surely we could have at least seen everything. But then, ending on something that demonstrated the most basic level of technical competence would hardly have made for an appropriate series finale. A temporary finale, as it turned out. But for at least the moment we can have a good time pretending.

Reviews in this series
Witchcraft (Spera, 1988)
Witchcraft II: The Temptress (Woods, 1989)
Witchcraft III: The Kiss of Death ("Tillmans" [Feldman], 1991)
Witchcraft IV: The Virgin Heart (Merendino, 1992)
Witchcraft V: Dance with the Devil (Hsu, 1993)
Witchcraft 666: The Devil's Mistress (Davis, 1994)
Witchcraft 7: Judgement Hour (Girard, 1995)
Witchcraft VIII: Salem's Ghost (Barmettler, 1996)
Witchcraft IX: Bitter Flesh (Girard, 1997)
Witchcraft X: Mistress of the Craft (Cabrera, 1998)
Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood (Ford, 2000)
Witchcraft XII: In the Lair of the Serpent (Sykes, 2004)
Witchcraft 13: Blood of the Chosen (House, 2008)
Witchcraft XIV: Angel of Death (Palmieri, 2016)
Witchcraft XV: Blood Rose (Palmieri, 2016)
Witchcraft XVI: Hollywood Coven (Palmieri, 2016)