Witchcraft IX: Bitter Flesh (1997)

There was a moment, a clear and shining moment, while I watched this film, the ninth in a series of films that should never have gone beyond five (to be generous), that led to my eyes glazing over and me having a vision. The film in front of me faded away, to be replaced by an image of me repeatedly banging my head against the coffee table in my living room. Except the coffee table didn't stay made out of hard wood, as it is in reality. No, it turned into a mass of squishy breast implants. And the harder I tried to knock myself into unconsciousness, the more I would just feel myself pushing into the implants. And then my sofa turned into a gum-popping bimbo, asking if I was okay and if  had found the right implants that I wanted her to wear yet.

I then came back to reality, rewound a few minutes of the film, and settled back in to endure the rest of Witchcraft IX: Bitter Flesh.

There are a few returning names this time around (director Michael Paul Girard and actor David Byrnes) and the plot, from a script written by Stephen Downing, is as dumb as you should expect by now. Will Spanner (Byrnes) is dead. He wanders around while coming to terms with this, sometimes seeing people have sex. One of those people having sex is a hooker named Sheila (Landon Hall). It turns out that Sheila can hear Will, which means that she ends up helping him in his quest to keep his good lady safe and deal with an evil enemy.

Here's the thing about Witchcraft IX: Bitter Flesh. It's actually quite amusing at times. Hall is a good sport when it comes to everything the role asks of her. She has to keep acting as if she can't see her main co-star, she is involved in one or two sex scenes, and she even acts differently at one point while being used as a vessel for a spirit. She's a highlight, and not just because I am easily distracted by nakedness. Although I suspect it is unintentional, the general premise of this film makes it slightly more fun than so many of its predecessors, and Hall helps to convey that fun.

So it's a shame, if not at all surprising, that the rest of the film is dire. The acting is terrible from almost everyone onscreen, there's a distinct lack of sexiness to any of the sex scenes (at least two of them are rapey, obviously or in sneakier ways, and one is a guy who just paid a hooker and decides to start his time with her in a lift), and it would appear that the film-makers were given a budget of approximately £100 with the condition that the financiers receive change. There are times when it feels more like a trailer for a film than an actual film itself, yet it still manages to be a slight improvement over so many of the previous entries. And I'll happily take a slight improvement over nothing.

I know that you're all laughing at me by now. I know it. Either you're laughing or it's the voices in my head again. It doesn't matter, I WILL see this series through to the end. Although I do hope that there IS an end to this series. To paraphrase someone much more talented than myself - "either this series will end or I will".

3/10

No main links. Go to Amazon.co.uk to buy stuff.
Or got to Amazon.com to buy stuff. Win win for me.

The films are so interchangeable that I can keep reusing this Charmed pic