Witchcraft II: The Temptress



Approximately 18 years after the first film, tiny baby William is living with his adopted parents, all grown, and getting ready to head off to college. He thinks he’s just a normal teen, with a normal family and a normal girlfriend and a normal life. But while he knows he’s been adopted, he’s never been told about his true origins, or more importantly that a coven of dark witches are still searching for him, because they believe that any child one of them may have with him will grow up to bring about Hell on Earth. Unfortunately for William and his family though, one of the dark witches has tracked him down and is now planning on getting him all hot and bothered so that she can set their evil plan into motion.



Sigh Okay, so about 4-ish years ago I watched the first Witchcraft, which is apparently the first part of a 16-film-long epic that involves an evil coven of witches trying to get their hands on this one kid. That movie was about as bland as bland can be, and I’m still not sure how it somehow managed to inspire 15 friggin’ sequels. But it was also the outlier of the franchise, because its primary focus wasn’t specifically on William, but also his mother. But this is the point in the series where things shift gears, William becomes front-and-center, and the films start to transition from straight-up horror into horror eroticism. Or at least they try to. Because while you can tell the movie is attempting to play everything off as 100% straight, most of it comes off as so cheesy that they totally missed the mark.


They did try though, bless them…

Look, I wasn’t all that impressed with the first Witchcraft, but at least I can concede that the first film was at least trying to muster together a complete plot. I mean, it was a lot of babies and priests and creepy family members and even creepier house shit, so it was basically a poor-man’s Rosemary’s Baby, but at least it was working with something. The plot to this film, however, can basically be boiled down to: desperate cougar harasses horny teen boy. Which is almost as hysterical as it is creepy, but that’s pretty much 90% of the movie. Sure sure, they do throw in some actual plot points, and it’s mostly through exposition. But they DO take the time to helpfully explain what’s going on here, as well as clarifying the generalized plot to the last film (thanks, Temptress!), so thank goodness at least for that. But the bulk of the film is essentially comprised of Will’s creepy neighbor Doloris, who is actually a witch disguised as his neighbor Doloris, shamelessly coming onto and trying to seduce him. But I guess Will isn’t into older women (despite this “teen” and his neighbor appearing to be the same age), because he keeps rejecting her until she’s forced to bewitch him in order to do the nasty. And I guess all that blatant sexual harassment is supposed to make the film feel more “erotic”, but it’s so forceful and overt (“here kid, help stabilize me on this ladder by holding onto my lace-clad ass”) that it often ends up feeling too ridiculous to be fully effective. Which is actually pretty funny, because I’m 99% sure that the filmmakers were legitimately trying to make this movie serious, but boy… Were they off.


Seriously lady, that kid was so horny that if you had just continued to wear that outfit I’m 99% sure he would have come around on his own eventually.

It also doesn’t help that much of what little plot it does have, ends up feeling completely unnecessary. Case in point: Boomer. Boomer is supposed to be Williams’ best friend. But after showing up early on for a whopping 2 scenes – in which he contributes nothing – he’s forgotten about until the end of the film, when he shows up for some ineffective comic relief, before leaving and getting killed by our witch friend about five seconds later. Why was he killed? Uh, well, presumably just to raise the film’s body count, because otherwise there was zero point in knocking him off. He wasn’t part of Will or his girlfriend’s scheme to kill the witch. He didn’t even know about it. Hell he was leaving and she summoned him over to her car because… cause she’s a bitch, I guess? I don’t know. Seemed like a giant waste of energy to me. I read one description claiming it was just to torment Will by killing people he loved, but Will was never told about his death at any point in the movie, so that doesn’t track. Nor do I understand why the witch was even in a car in the first place. She lived, like, two blocks away, what did she need to drive over for. She could have just walked her ass over. Just more confusing things on top of already confusing things.


Um, why? I know he was annoying, but he wasn’t, like, neck-snap worthy levels of annoying.

Then the movie gets to the end, and somebody on staff must have gotten a bug up their butt to suddenly be “arty”. Because suddenly Dolores is adding in some arm flourishes to her grand entrance, rock music is playing, she unnecessarily breaks some lamps (rude), a tumbleweed shows up (the hell?), there’s a lot of writhing and unnecessary yelling… It’s just wild. And then after she’s dispatched (in a confusing cloud of ash) the movie ends with Will and his girlfriend fading in and out of existence throughout their Americana living room, until they finally stop, embrace, and then stare off just to the left of the screen as the credits roll. It honestly feels like the director suddenly changed, and the new person had only worked with music videos, because holy hell WTF just happened and what are you all doing all of a sudden?




And this is the sped up version. I had to sit through over a minute of this nonsense.


See, I wasn’t joking about the random tumbleweed!

Sometimes a weird-ass plot can be made up for by decent acting or even effects, but alas, the film fails on those two points as well. The effects on display are mostly rudimentary at best. The most you can hope for is some reversed film footage and a couple splotches of blood. And a lot of that blood is only there because they reused footage from the first Witchcraft, presumably because they really liked that one scene with the blood coming out of the witches mouth and – by god – they were going to get their money’s worth from it, even if it meant showing it to you half a dozen times (yes, really). I think they only have one actual special effect, where a character is trapped by some sort of fire barrier, I guess? But all it is is a very quick flash of a cheap fire overlay, and it’s so random and so hysterically bad that I literally laughed out loud when it popped up on screen.



And the acting is… Well, some of it is actually okay. The ladies in particular do a pretty decent job of emoting and keeping things together. Delia Sheppard in particular does an excellent job as the witch. Granted, most of her job involved being the hot sexpot, but she was a damn good sexpot, so I feel my claim still stands. The downside though is that you have to watch Charles Solomon and he’s, eh, not great. I think he does a lot of producing now, and honestly that was a good call, because most of his “acting” in this film seems to be centered around making exaggerated facial expressions and talking…a lot…like….this. So he wasn’t what I would call all that engaging. AND I think he managed to keep this same role through the fourth film of the series, so I’m not really looking forward to watching him in any more of these things (if I even get around to watching them at all.)


Your leading man, ladies and gentlemen.

After watching the first Witchcraft my expectations for Witchcraft II were already pretty low, but I think this film managed to exceed my expectations by being even worse and that…that is an impressive feat. The effects were worse, the performances were worse, and the story was almost as nonsensical as it was non-existent. Admittedly, I was greatly amused by most of it, especially the insane ending, but it probably wasn’t for the reasons the filmmakers intended. Or maybe it was, because they wouldn’t have kept making them if they hadn’t been making any money. And yet I’ve read that these films just get worse and worse as the series continues? Nah. I ain’t looking forward to that, so I don’t expect I’ll continue. Or at least I won’t for a good long while. But hey! If you like slightly erotic (you see boobs once), cheesy horror films, that are light on horror and heavy on cheese, then feel free to give this a try. But if you want something that looks nice, with an actual, gripping storyline or decent performances, then you’re going to want to look elsewhere.

Witchcraft II is available on a variety of streaming services.

Witchcraft II is also available on DVD.

Helpful Links: