Warlock III: The End of Innocence



College art student Kris Miller gets a sudden phone call from a city official one morning, informing her that she is the only known descendant of the owner of an old, mysterious house. The house in question is set to be demolished soon, but the city is giving her a chance to go and see if there is anything in there she wants before they knock it down. So Kris and a few of her college buddies head to the old estate to look around. While they’re poking about the place they’re also visited by a suave, mysterious stranger claiming to have knowledge of the house. But unbeknownst to Kris, not only does the stranger know about the home, but he also knows about Kris’s own mystifying past as well.



Warlock III: The End of Innocence is a Direct-to-Video horror movie from 1999, and is the third and final installment (so far, who knows) of the Warlock films that began a full decade earlier. Unlike the first two films, this one does not star Julian Sands as the titular villain. Which is a tad disappointing, but also fine, as there was never any real continuity between any of these films anyway. Instead that character is played by Bruce Payne, who seems to have made a name for himself by playing a variety of bad-guy roles, so he fits in just fine. Which is more than I can say for the movie. Because while I did kind of like it, it really doesn’t quite fit in with the vibe of the earlier two installments.



The movie still follows the basic premise of a group of people trying to survive and outwit a powerful warlock with dubious intentions. But while those movies had a bit more of an action/adventure bent, this one honestly just feels like your standard haunted house movie. Seriously, if you swapped out Payne’s descriptor from warlock to ghost it really wouldn’t change much. Because it’s basically just a movie where a bunch of weird shit happens to a bunch of people in a creepy old house. It isn’t until the very end – literally the last five freaking minutes – where the warlock finally reveals the reason for tormenting Kris and her friends, and an actual Satanic motivation is revealed. Whereas in the earlier films his motives were clearly established from the get-go. So if you had just happened to stumble upon the film on cable back in the day during the wee hours of the morning and weren’t paying attention to the title, you probably would have just assumed everyone was being harassed by an asshole ghost, not some emissary of the Devil.


There’s even a creepy ghost girl. A standard feature in all haunted houses.

Another change from the other films in the series is that this movie came out after Scream, so it feels like it’s trying to be a lot more “hip, teen-centric”, complete with a slight sense of self-awareness, and an alternative soundtrack, which was all the rage back in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. So the movie feels very different from the earlier films. Which isn’t necessarily bad, unless you can’t stand that particular type of music. Luckily for me though I didn’t find their song choices to be nearly as annoying as some other films from that era *shudders at the thought of American Psycho 2*


Bum-tidda bum-tidda bum SAINT ELMO’S FIRE! ~

The film’s biggest issue though, is that the pacing is…. Well, it kinda sucks, really. Beyond a quick flashback scene, it takes close to 40-minutes for the damn warlock to show up and finally kill someone (and his first victim is not, inexplicably, one of the annoying teens.) And then after that there’s another 20-minutes of him setting up the metaphorical chessboard of emotional manipulation of the other characters, before he finally gets down to the business of killing most of these chuckleheads. That means the movie spends a full 2/3rds of its time setting up its (very) simple story and just dicking around, before the damn plot finally kicks in.


Sorry, the warlock still isn’t here yet. You want some pancakes while we wait?

Thankfully though, the acting ends up being pretty decent, especially from leads Ashley Laurence, who horror fans may recognize as Krissy from the Hellraiser series, and Bruce Payne, who may not be quite as suave as Julian Sands was in the role, but he does feel a lot more sinister, which works well for the character. Everyone else is perfectly fine and suitable for their various roles. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out why the movie, for whatever reason, decided to make almost all of Kris’s friends such utter a-holes. And honestly, I can’t figure out why she’s friends with all but one of them. The one guy acts like a macho dick. His girlfriend isn’t really much better. The one guy is like an early draft of an Incel. Hell, even her own boyfriend is introduced to the audience by jumping her from behind like a violent home invader because he likes to scare her (classy guy, that one). I can’t even figure out why these people are hanging out with one another. Most of them barely seem to tolerate each other, let alone like everyone. So when the series of “betrayals” comes into play later in the film, it’s not really a surprise when they all end up letting Kris down. They’re just sucky people who continue to suck, and I can’t believe that Kris was so surprised by their actions. It was obvious to me what was going to happen and I’d only spent an hour watching them. She’d known some of them for years. I’m just saying that I feel like the whole impact of the “your friends will betray you” scenes they were clearly going for would have been a lot more effective if any of them had been shown to be decent human beings to begin with.



One good thing the movie does have in its favor is that, even with the crappy pacing and annoying characters, the film does manage to look good and have a pretty good sense of atmosphere. It’s creepy gothic, but a well-lit, creepy gothic. So at no point do you have a chance to miss all the creepiness going on due to the film being plunged into near darkness. Hell, it even has a couple of really nice gore moments, and even one neat VFX moment to its credit, where the warlock smashes one of the characters to death like a piece of porcelain. Of course, there’s also one rather crappy FX scene in the film as well. But they get the scene over with quickly and it looks better than that lousy flying sequence they used in the first film, so I’m willing to let that one slide a bit, because overall the film looks very good for a Direct-to-Video effort.




The hell is she wearing? Did she order that nightie from some sort of Medieval wench catalogue?

Look, I”m not saying that Warlock III: The End of Innocence is necessarily a great film, but I liked it for what it was. And, for what it’s worth, even with the vibe and focus change, I do think it’s still better than the second movie in the series. I’m sure die-hard fans of the series (are there any?) would heavily disagree with me on that, but I said what I said. It may be flawed with pacing issues and some annoying characters, but the acting and visuals make up for a lot. Plus, Payne does make for a good villain, even if he does take his sweet-ass time to finally show up on screen. So no, it’s not perfect, but I do think it’s a decent movie. If you need something easy to put on at night and don’t mind the lack of action, then this one isn’t a bad choice.

Warlock III: The End of Innocence is available on a variety of streaming services.

Warlock III: The End of Innocence is also available on DVD.

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