Witchcraft IX: Bitter Flesh (1997)

Too much of everything

A Major Disappointment

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

BITTER FLESH is the ninth entry in the endless WITCHCRAFT series of straight-to-video sex horrors and undoubtedly the worst yet. The horror content of this story is particularly mild, with murders linked to an ancient Egyptian cult and a dead man whose spirit enters the body of a nubile young woman.The emphasis is very much on the sex content here, with an endless string of sexual situations which are anything but titillating. Instead they just go on and on, padding out the running time but achieving very little else. The actresses are all surgically enhanced but have no such artificial help when it comes to their acting ability, which is rock bottom. The dialogue is as crude as it gets and the production values non-existent. Yep, I hated it.

Two dead bodies are on the floor of a modern art gallery, one of them belonging to lawyer/ warlock Will Spanner. Spanner gets up out of his body, at which point his body disappears. Detectives Lutz and Garner find the other body, then later find the body of a woman who's had her heart cut out, and Egyptian symbols painted on the wall in black along with a triangle with an eye over it painted in blood.Spanner wanders around as a ghost, until he finds someone who can hear (but not see) him. That person is Sheila, a hooker, who's gained some powers after having a car accident.This being an erotic horror movie, or at least having ambitions in that direction, there are a few sex scenes with Sheila. There are also some involving Spanner's girlfriend Keli with someone using his body.Spanner tries to warn his girlfriend, about whom Sheila has had a bad premonitory nightmare, and their story intersects with that of the police investigation. Stephanie Beaton plays Detective Lutz, formerly played by Alisa Christensen in Witchcraft 7. Being a Detective, evidently one is allowed to wear high heels, short skirts, and extremely low-cut blouses; good thing, too! Garner and Keli are played by different actors than in part seven as well, but David Byrnes returns as Spanner.This movie picks up where Witchcraft 7 left off (also directed by Girard), though it rewrites how that one ended to some extent. Spanner's dead in a gallery instead of a home. There's another body with him, when the one in 7 was a not-dead-yet vampire who crawled away and died elsewhere. Lutz and Garner saw Spanner dead, here they didn't. Spanner has long hair and a goatee he lacked in part seven.There are some confusing images during the opening credits of this one which are not in this movie, which are flashbacks to that one. Consequently, it may be better to watch 7 before this, though with most other titles in the series the order doesn't matter. Part Eight is unrelated.This is fairly entertaining, although it takes a while to get moving. Will Spanner wanders around a lot in the beginning, and we meet some characters who turn out to be unimportant. The actress playing Sheila performs a bit unevenly, but that may have been the direction she was given.

This is by far, in my opinion, the best Witchcraft movie. This one actually has a story! The others are soft-core porn thinly disguised as horror movies. I'm not saying that this one didn't have any sex scenes. It did. Alot of them to. But it still had more of a story line. There were only a couple of downsides to it. One of them was the guy who played the pimp. Jesus! I wanted to smack this guy around more then anything! His acting was that bad! Also, they didn't show Stephanie Beaton that much! But I think that was because this was her first Witchcraft appearance. Other than that, this is the best Witchcraft entry!!

I don't know why I actually like some of the WITCHCRAFT entries, but I do. Anyway, this is probably the 3rd best of the low budget(And I mean low.)direct-to-video series behind 1 and 5. This time Will Spanner(From 1-7.)comes back to Earth as a ghost after the aftermath of part 7(Part 8 had nothing to do with the rest.)to find his killer. He seeks the help of a prostitute who is sick of her occupation, and his girlfriend Kelly. Plus there is a ritualistic killer who just happens to notice Spanner's friends and stalks them. Good story, and o.k acting, except for one of the bad guys who rapes the prostitute, what a terrible actor. *** out of *****.