You're a good fuck, but I don't like loose ends.
"If you like watching naked people have sex, it’s incredibly hot."
As I write these words, Witchcraft XVI: Hollywood Coven is the last of the direct-to-video Witchcraft movies, and there's a clear sense of finality to it. With sixteen entries across 28 years, the series' one and only claim to fame, as the horror franchise with the most entries, is secure; it can slumber now in its unquiet, eldritch sleep. I'm not an optimist that we've truly seen the last of these, but I can at least rest well myself, having completed one of the most unpleasant endurance tests a horror buff can attempt.
That being said, enduring Hollywood Coven isn't all that tough, honestly. The series has certainly turned out significantly worse entries than this one, as recently as its immediate predecessor, Witchcraft XV: Blood Rose. Indeed, there came a moment during the running time of Hollywood Coven where I had a most extraordinary experience: I laughed out loud at a joke in the movie that it had intended for me to laugh at. Getting unironic pleasure out of one of these things was a possibility I'd written off quite a few entries ago, and the even better thing is that it's not the only joke that lands in Sean Abley's script. Which is extra-shocking, because Abley also wrote Blood Rose, and I had him pegged as the likeliest reason that entry was so much worse than its own immediate predecessor, Witchcraft XIV: Angel of Death. All three of these last Witchcraft pictures were made by mostly the same cast and crew, over a single span of production that only lasted several days, and Abley was one of the few people who worked on the second entry but not the first. Regardless, he has here provided certainly the most entertaining scenario of the three, so I guess it just goes to show. Show what, I'm not sure.
At any rate, Hollywood Coven comes by its success entirely dishonestly. This isn't really a Witchcraft movie at all; for a series that has gone to inexplicable lengths to preserve the integrity of its ongoing narrative continuity, it's an outright spit in the eye. The first scene immediately pays off the hooks left at the end of Blood Rose, with Danielle (Jessica Beck) having sex with her boyfriend Nick (Manny Cazz), only to reveal that she's not Danielle at all, she's Danielle's body being controlled by the evil yoga witch Sharon (Noël VanBrocklin), and she kills Nick out of pure evil spite. And then Jamal the director (Ernest Pierce) yells "cut", and we jump behind the camera of Crystal Force 15: Blood Rose, and we will spend the rest of Hollywood Coven's 82 minutes in this brand new narrative universe.
In other words: this Witchcraft movie is about the other 15 Witchcraft movies, and boy oh boy, does it ever have a shitty attitude about them. Way shittier than the one I've had, if you can believe it. One of the big ongoing plot points is that Garner (Leroy Castanon), an actor who played a detective in Crystal Force 14 and 15, and is set to do so again in Crystal Force 16: Freshman Year (unlike the last three Witchcrafts, the Crystal Force movies do not appear to have all been shot over the course of a long weekend), is convinced that the series has a curse on it. Which it does, and we already learned this fact, when Shelly, the actress playing Danielle, was ritualistically murdered by Jamal. But Garner has to figure this out the hard way, which involves going through the IMDb pages of every single Crystal Force and noting with alarm that nobody who stars in any of them seems to have ever starred again in anything else. And it's one thing to self-reflexively mock the cheapness and contrived writing of one's own franchise - Hollywood Coven absolutely does so, numerous times. But to say of the actors, "haha, this series has only cast untalented nobodies who couldn't even hack it in porn, it's almost like they were being murdered as soon as the shoots were over!", that's just ice-cold. I love it.
It's one thing to have people making a Witchcraft inside of a Witchcraft crack jokes about the threadbare production values and general idiocy of the Witchcrafts. That's not the spit in the eye I was talking about. And maybe it should be, because I'm generally not fond of this kind of smug, self-protective irony. But it's not like a single one of the Witchcrafts ever rose up to "not terrible". But anyway, the insult is that this movie isn't even trying to make sense in the context of the narrative universe that has been established to this point. The Crystal Force series is analogous to Witchcraft, but they are not the same. And the character names of the actors making Crystal Force 16 are all the same as they always have been: Garner, Lutz (Berna Roberts), Will "Spanner" Tanner (Ryan Cleary), or maybe it's Will "Tanner" Spanner, and I can't help but feel like either way, it was meant to patch up a line somebody fluffed; Rose (Molly Dougherty) and Sharon and Tara (Zamra Dollskin). And again, these aren't the same characters at all - they're just played by the same actors and have the same lines. But "our" Will Spanner, the one who was bred to be the antichrist but instead became a white warlock and attorney at law, he's nowhere to be found in Hollywood Coven.
Not that it matters, really. This is a lousy, off-book capstone to a long, long run of horror movies, but it's actually watchable as a fairly venomous satire about the low-rent conditions of direct-to-video production. Hollywood Coven takes it title with deadly seriousness: this is stuffed to the brim with tossed-off asides and gags and plot points about life in the Los Angeles film industry as a jobbing actor, grounding itself firmly in the tactile reality of Hollywood as a place: the climax of the story hinges on the acrimony between Angelenos and people from Orange County, and how the only thing they can agree on is that they don't hate each other nearly as much as they hate people from the Valley.
This is an unexpected way to end a series that has mostly been about the forces of good witches trying to stop bad witches from raising Satan; but it kind of works. Hollywood Coven has a distinctly bratty vibe, like Abley and director David Palmieri, as well as at least some of the actors, had gotten bored and just decided, fuck it, time to flip over the table and storm out. The plot about using the production of a longrunning movie series to focus dark malefic forces, and recruit all the dark witches in Los Angeles under the same banner, carries us through for a bit, but it's clear from the start that everybody's heart is much more in taking the piss out of film production than in actually trying to tell a paranormal horror story. And so, a huge quantity of the film's running time is basically just actors farting around being actors. There's a running gag that pretty much every character is either just coming from or just going to some manner of acting class or workshop (and the joke is all the funnier because, as esoteric as some of the classes get - one character needs to go practice the particular kind of standing in front of the camera you do on the set of a soap opera - they all sound like they're probably real), and some of the best moments in this or any other Witchcraft come from Lutz poking fun at Garner, thinking that he's just gone overboard in trying to find his character. The gag I laughed at, incidentally, was one of these moments: "Stop with all the Uta Hagen character work! This is Crystal Force 16, trust me, you’re good." Maybe not the best thing on paper, but Roberts delivers it with a huge amount of cheery "you goddamn idiot" gusto. For that matter, she's a pip throughout: it's her biggest role in the trilogy, and she's obviously the best cast member, so it works out pretty well to give the film a bright tone and punchy sense of humor. Hell, I might go so far as to say that Roberts, in this last entry, gives the single best performance in any Witchcraft movie. Not the highest bar, but I was glad to see it cleared.
This is all describing a much better movie than the star rating I have given it, I am aware. And the thing is: this was the tail-end of a rushed production of three features on no budget. In other words, this is disastrously ill-made. There are terrible sound edits all throughout; practically every single line Dougherty delivers in the entire film is caked in fuzzy static, for one extremely obvious example. The cast is wildly erratic: Roberts and Castanon are on their best behavior, but nobody else is. Playing an actor chilling with other acrors seems, weirdly, to have thoroughly freaked Cleary out, and he can't deliver a single line of dialogue without breaking it all down into strange, inorganic rhythms. The pacing is miserable: Jamal gives the actors copy of the "Crystal Force" DVDs to watch, which means we spend several minutes scattered across the middle watching people watching Witchcraft movies, and making thin, uncomfortable jokes about how stupid they are, and how there are so many sex scenes (in fact, we see here far more sex in stock footage than shot new for Hollywood Coven, notwithstanding the opening that drops us right in the middle of coitus). It's a kind of victory lap, I guess, but it's paralyzingly dull. So in the end, we still have a Witchcraft picture, trapped by the hard limits of how little time or money have ever been spent on these; it looks and sounds like shit, it's boring, it's dumb, etc. But at least there's some actual visible effort that went into making this one a somewhat creative and effectively snark last bow.
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)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
--Sharon (Noël VanBrocklin), a character in Witchcraft XVI: Hollywood Coven, reviewing Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood, and by extension, every other Witchcraft picture
As I write these words, Witchcraft XVI: Hollywood Coven is the last of the direct-to-video Witchcraft movies, and there's a clear sense of finality to it. With sixteen entries across 28 years, the series' one and only claim to fame, as the horror franchise with the most entries, is secure; it can slumber now in its unquiet, eldritch sleep. I'm not an optimist that we've truly seen the last of these, but I can at least rest well myself, having completed one of the most unpleasant endurance tests a horror buff can attempt.
That being said, enduring Hollywood Coven isn't all that tough, honestly. The series has certainly turned out significantly worse entries than this one, as recently as its immediate predecessor, Witchcraft XV: Blood Rose. Indeed, there came a moment during the running time of Hollywood Coven where I had a most extraordinary experience: I laughed out loud at a joke in the movie that it had intended for me to laugh at. Getting unironic pleasure out of one of these things was a possibility I'd written off quite a few entries ago, and the even better thing is that it's not the only joke that lands in Sean Abley's script. Which is extra-shocking, because Abley also wrote Blood Rose, and I had him pegged as the likeliest reason that entry was so much worse than its own immediate predecessor, Witchcraft XIV: Angel of Death. All three of these last Witchcraft pictures were made by mostly the same cast and crew, over a single span of production that only lasted several days, and Abley was one of the few people who worked on the second entry but not the first. Regardless, he has here provided certainly the most entertaining scenario of the three, so I guess it just goes to show. Show what, I'm not sure.
At any rate, Hollywood Coven comes by its success entirely dishonestly. This isn't really a Witchcraft movie at all; for a series that has gone to inexplicable lengths to preserve the integrity of its ongoing narrative continuity, it's an outright spit in the eye. The first scene immediately pays off the hooks left at the end of Blood Rose, with Danielle (Jessica Beck) having sex with her boyfriend Nick (Manny Cazz), only to reveal that she's not Danielle at all, she's Danielle's body being controlled by the evil yoga witch Sharon (Noël VanBrocklin), and she kills Nick out of pure evil spite. And then Jamal the director (Ernest Pierce) yells "cut", and we jump behind the camera of Crystal Force 15: Blood Rose, and we will spend the rest of Hollywood Coven's 82 minutes in this brand new narrative universe.
In other words: this Witchcraft movie is about the other 15 Witchcraft movies, and boy oh boy, does it ever have a shitty attitude about them. Way shittier than the one I've had, if you can believe it. One of the big ongoing plot points is that Garner (Leroy Castanon), an actor who played a detective in Crystal Force 14 and 15, and is set to do so again in Crystal Force 16: Freshman Year (unlike the last three Witchcrafts, the Crystal Force movies do not appear to have all been shot over the course of a long weekend), is convinced that the series has a curse on it. Which it does, and we already learned this fact, when Shelly, the actress playing Danielle, was ritualistically murdered by Jamal. But Garner has to figure this out the hard way, which involves going through the IMDb pages of every single Crystal Force and noting with alarm that nobody who stars in any of them seems to have ever starred again in anything else. And it's one thing to self-reflexively mock the cheapness and contrived writing of one's own franchise - Hollywood Coven absolutely does so, numerous times. But to say of the actors, "haha, this series has only cast untalented nobodies who couldn't even hack it in porn, it's almost like they were being murdered as soon as the shoots were over!", that's just ice-cold. I love it.
It's one thing to have people making a Witchcraft inside of a Witchcraft crack jokes about the threadbare production values and general idiocy of the Witchcrafts. That's not the spit in the eye I was talking about. And maybe it should be, because I'm generally not fond of this kind of smug, self-protective irony. But it's not like a single one of the Witchcrafts ever rose up to "not terrible". But anyway, the insult is that this movie isn't even trying to make sense in the context of the narrative universe that has been established to this point. The Crystal Force series is analogous to Witchcraft, but they are not the same. And the character names of the actors making Crystal Force 16 are all the same as they always have been: Garner, Lutz (Berna Roberts), Will "Spanner" Tanner (Ryan Cleary), or maybe it's Will "Tanner" Spanner, and I can't help but feel like either way, it was meant to patch up a line somebody fluffed; Rose (Molly Dougherty) and Sharon and Tara (Zamra Dollskin). And again, these aren't the same characters at all - they're just played by the same actors and have the same lines. But "our" Will Spanner, the one who was bred to be the antichrist but instead became a white warlock and attorney at law, he's nowhere to be found in Hollywood Coven.
Not that it matters, really. This is a lousy, off-book capstone to a long, long run of horror movies, but it's actually watchable as a fairly venomous satire about the low-rent conditions of direct-to-video production. Hollywood Coven takes it title with deadly seriousness: this is stuffed to the brim with tossed-off asides and gags and plot points about life in the Los Angeles film industry as a jobbing actor, grounding itself firmly in the tactile reality of Hollywood as a place: the climax of the story hinges on the acrimony between Angelenos and people from Orange County, and how the only thing they can agree on is that they don't hate each other nearly as much as they hate people from the Valley.
This is an unexpected way to end a series that has mostly been about the forces of good witches trying to stop bad witches from raising Satan; but it kind of works. Hollywood Coven has a distinctly bratty vibe, like Abley and director David Palmieri, as well as at least some of the actors, had gotten bored and just decided, fuck it, time to flip over the table and storm out. The plot about using the production of a longrunning movie series to focus dark malefic forces, and recruit all the dark witches in Los Angeles under the same banner, carries us through for a bit, but it's clear from the start that everybody's heart is much more in taking the piss out of film production than in actually trying to tell a paranormal horror story. And so, a huge quantity of the film's running time is basically just actors farting around being actors. There's a running gag that pretty much every character is either just coming from or just going to some manner of acting class or workshop (and the joke is all the funnier because, as esoteric as some of the classes get - one character needs to go practice the particular kind of standing in front of the camera you do on the set of a soap opera - they all sound like they're probably real), and some of the best moments in this or any other Witchcraft come from Lutz poking fun at Garner, thinking that he's just gone overboard in trying to find his character. The gag I laughed at, incidentally, was one of these moments: "Stop with all the Uta Hagen character work! This is Crystal Force 16, trust me, you’re good." Maybe not the best thing on paper, but Roberts delivers it with a huge amount of cheery "you goddamn idiot" gusto. For that matter, she's a pip throughout: it's her biggest role in the trilogy, and she's obviously the best cast member, so it works out pretty well to give the film a bright tone and punchy sense of humor. Hell, I might go so far as to say that Roberts, in this last entry, gives the single best performance in any Witchcraft movie. Not the highest bar, but I was glad to see it cleared.
This is all describing a much better movie than the star rating I have given it, I am aware. And the thing is: this was the tail-end of a rushed production of three features on no budget. In other words, this is disastrously ill-made. There are terrible sound edits all throughout; practically every single line Dougherty delivers in the entire film is caked in fuzzy static, for one extremely obvious example. The cast is wildly erratic: Roberts and Castanon are on their best behavior, but nobody else is. Playing an actor chilling with other acrors seems, weirdly, to have thoroughly freaked Cleary out, and he can't deliver a single line of dialogue without breaking it all down into strange, inorganic rhythms. The pacing is miserable: Jamal gives the actors copy of the "Crystal Force" DVDs to watch, which means we spend several minutes scattered across the middle watching people watching Witchcraft movies, and making thin, uncomfortable jokes about how stupid they are, and how there are so many sex scenes (in fact, we see here far more sex in stock footage than shot new for Hollywood Coven, notwithstanding the opening that drops us right in the middle of coitus). It's a kind of victory lap, I guess, but it's paralyzingly dull. So in the end, we still have a Witchcraft picture, trapped by the hard limits of how little time or money have ever been spent on these; it looks and sounds like shit, it's boring, it's dumb, etc. But at least there's some actual visible effort that went into making this one a somewhat creative and effectively snark last bow.
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)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
