Witchcraft 14: Angel Of Death (2016)

It's the fourteenth instalment in this series. I long ago gave up on the idea of any originality, or even any level of basic technical competence, but I am going to make it through this entire series, as long as I have all of my main faculties available to me (which looks less and less likely with each film I subject myself to).

Rose (Molly Dougherty) is a young woman with supernatural powers. Viewers find this out when she destroys the lover of her partner, and then goes on to destroy him. She soon comes to the attention of Samuel (Jeremy Sykes), a man who runs a yoga studio, but who is more concerned with connecting with women that he knows have certain powers. He uses Sharon (Noel VanBrocklin) and Tara (Zamra Dollskin) to make Rose feel more comfortable, all while moving further towards his nefarious end goal.

Director David Palmieri joins the series here, and he would also direct the next two films. Palmieri is either better than his predecessors at stretching the budget or, more plausibly, the lowering prices of filmmaking equipment that can provide decent results leads to this being a minor step up from quite a few of the previous entries in the series. It's still not good when compared to actual movies that have had a bit more effort put into them, but it's not as bad in terms of the visual and audio quality.

The script from Keith Parker, however, is as ridiculous and unbelievable as any of the other Witchcraft movies. I have given a brief plot summary without revealing any of the extra details, especially one or two third act "highlights", but trust me when I say that it's just supernatural silliness from beginning to end. We get returning characters in the shape of Will Spanner (played by Ryan Cleary this time), and Lutz (Berna Roberts) and Garner (Leroy Castanon), and none of them are fazed by the events that they have now dealt with numerous times before.

Should I be polite about the cast members? I guess so. Nobody is there to win an Academy Award, and they do what is asked of them, overall. Dougherty is actually one of the better females to have a Witchcraft film under her belt, VanBrocklin and Dollskin are stuck with worse parts of the script, Roberts and Castanon work reasonably well together, and Sykes tries to inject a bit of fun into his performance. The only person I can't pretend to tolerate is Cleary, who is one of the worst actors to portray the ever-changing face of Will Spanner in the entire series. Sadly, as well as the director, he also carries over to the next two films. Yayyyyyyyy.

Not as painful as many of the other instalments, this still doesn't do enough to be considered a good movie.

3/10

Buy Charmed here. You know you want to.

Aliens Vs College Girls (2017)

AKA Aliens Vs Titanic.

There are some movies that overcome their low budgets, ladle on the charm, and make the most of their shortcomings to become something that, while never topping any all-time favourite lists, can become a nice little recommendation to keep up your sleeve when fellow film fans want to find something that hasn't already been given too much exposure.

Aliens Vs College Girls is not one of those movies. Directed by Jeff Leroy, it's a hot mess that tries to throw enough silliness and gratuitous nudity into the first 10 minutes to keep the easily amused viewer attentive for the remainder of the, thankfully short, runtime. The writer is credited as Cameron T. James, which I assume is another "witty" gag, but IMDb has a story credit for Keith Parker so we'll let him share the blame.

The plot, as slight as it is, goes as follows: The spaceship Titan-1C is struck by a space meteor shower, and in the rocks that hit the vessel there are small aliens. It turns out that these aliens can invade hosts and control them, with humans proving to be quite perfect as a potential breeding ground for their kind. A small band of survivors, nominally led by Lana Vickers (Tasha Tacosa), eventually figures this out and tries to survive until the end credits roll.

Don't get excited by the paragraph above. I have inadvertently made the film sound a lot more interesting and exciting than it actually is. After those opening scenes, which at least have Bree Olson cavorting around for a while, it's all downhill. The characters are hard to care about, at all, the film feels padded out throughout most of the middle section, and most of the first third, and a lot of the finale, and there are special effects on display here that fall far below the standard set even by the very first series of Red Dwarf (coming up for thirty years old next year).

Sadly, Jeff Leroy is capable of doing better with this kind of schlock, as he showed when he gave us the enjoyably daft Creepies. If this had some better humour running through a lot of the scenes, if just a little bit of extra time was done to polish the CGI, or if there was a better way to scatter the nudity and sex throughout without it feeling boring then this could have been easy entertainment for whenever you didn't want something that required too much concentration. It ends up being one to completely avoid instead.

2/10.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Aliens-vs-College-Girls-DVD/dp/B0717465LD