Bloody Nightmares #8: The Bewitching (2006)

Soft-core porn masquerading as horror, Gary Sax's The Bewitching is competently made but offers little to genre fans aside from a parade of nude women in never-ending sex scenes. Not that there's anything wrong with that. However, if you're hoping for more than a skeleton of a storyline, you're likely to be disappointed.

What plot there is can be summed up rather easily. Gretchen (Beverly Lynne, The Zombie Chronicles, Terror Toons) is a witch who annoys her coven by taking on a corporial form and heading to Vegas. There, she has sex with a bunch of dudes, eventually trapping them in her mirror for some unknown reason. Jezebel, another witch, travels to Vegas to retrieve her, but flirts with some dork (Lysander Abadia) until Zenda (Mary Elizabeth), the head witch, shows up. Unrecognizable to Gretchen, the two of them get down and dirty before Zenda kills Gretchen and releases the guys in the mirror. SPOOKY!

Director Gary Sax has had a lot of experience with low budget nonsense and the movie looks perfectly fine for a shot on DV effort. The visuals are helped along by a nifty soundtrack of surf rock, much of it composed by the director. That said, the film only really takes advantage of two locations, a bar and a bedroom, and they quickly become repetitive. Sax shoots the sex scenes like a pro (pornographer), but whatever directorial talents he may have are hardly stretched.

It's almost a little unfair to compare the acting in this to the acting in the previous films in this collection, as this is almost a semi-professional production by comparison. Most of the acting here is really hammy, even if the performers are handicapped (figuratively) by an incredibly awful script. Beverly Lynne is fine as Gretchen, particularly since her main requirement is to look good in various states of undress. She performs admirably. The rest of the cast range from passable to awful, particularly Lysander Abadia as Cedric the awful comic relief, and the throaty Mary Elizabeth as Zenda. Both are bad at delivering lines, though Cedric doesn't have an all girl sex scene to fall back on.

Lighting and sound are both servicable, and generally much better than the other efforts in this collection, though there are some weak special effects whenever the men are shown trapped in the mirror. An overuse of filters throughout is likely supposed to add mystery to the half baked plot, but often makes things look like a cheap 80s music video.

If you're looking for naked ladies, then the film delivers the goods. More than half the running time is devoted to sex in one form or another, including a completely random scene of a woman servicing a television repairman. The final sex scene between Gretchen and Zenda does seem rather anticlimactic however, if that's the right word.

Image quality is fine throughout, and the sound is balanced enough to make most dialogue easily distinguishable. Not that anyone is here for the witty discourse.

With more sex than brains on display, The Bewitching delivers exactly what it promises. Lots of softcore sex featuring plenty of attractive women, and a silly plot that only exists to get the audience from one act of copulation to the next. Sure there are witches, but there's nothing scary here except some of the acting. Not really worth your time, unless you're desperate for T&A.