Crew
Director – Sean Barton, Screenplay – Sean Barton & John Hunt, Producer – Christopher Coy, Photography – Phillip Grosvenor, Music – Julian Laxton & Patric Van Blerk, Special Effects – Beverly McLeish, Creature Effects – Chris Walas Inc, Production Design – Jon Jon Lambon. Production Company – Blue Rock Films Ltd/Screen Media Limited/Three’s Company (Pty) Ltd./Panga Management Company (Proprietary) Limited.
Cast
Jenilee Harrison (Elizabeth Armstrong), Christopher Lee (Dr Pearson), Henry Cele (Mletch), Andre Jacobs (Geoff Armstrong), Zoe Randall (Anthea Steed), Jennifer Steyn (Cindy), Gavin Hood (Robert), Olivia Dyer (Chloe Steed), Dumi Shongwe (Witchdoctor)
Plot
East Africa, 1950. Elizabeth is an American woman married to plantation owner Geoff Armstrong. Elizabeth’s sister Cindy and her husband Robert visit and they take a tour of a native village. Cindy is shocked when they come upon a native ritual in which a witchdoctor is sacrificing a goat and intervenes to save the goat. The outraged witchdoctor places a curse on her that the child she is pregnant with will not live. Soon after, Elizabeth collapses, wracked in pain. At the same time something comes after them to kill them and Elizabeth is forced to flee for her life.
The Curse series of films, which consist of The Curse (1987), Curse II: The Bite (1988), Curse III: Blood Sacrifice and Catacombs/Curse IV: The Netherworld (1993), has the distinction of being an entirely artificially manufactured film series. Though posing as sequels, none of the films have the slightest connection in terms of theme, plot elements, characters or even production personnel. At most you could say that the Curse series is very loosely linked by all of them featuring lots of cheap 1980s popcorn makeup effects. The Curse was an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation about mutating produce and animals on a farm; Curse II was about a mutant snakebite; Curse III features an African voodoo curse; while Curse IV was about a trapped demon stirring inside an Italian monastery. In the case of Curse III here, it was originally shot and even released as a film called Panga before being bought up and renamed as part of the Curse series for US release.
The dubious stature that Curse III: Blood Sacrifice has is that it was the best film made in the series up to that point, although Catacombs/Curse IV is better in what feels like a race to the least worst film. The film was co-produced by English and South African companies and shot in South Africa, directed by British-born Sean Barton, who is best known as an editor on films like Eye of the Needle (1981), Return of the Jedi (1983), Jagged Edge (1985) and The Fly II (1989), among others. This has been Barton’s one and only directorial outing.
Barton’s horror scenes often become tediously drawn out. Not a whole lot seems to happen for much of the film – lots of scenes of cars driving back and forward through the countryside. The scenes where Jenilee Harrison is chased through the fields seem to go on forever. There’s one sequence where the camera point-of-view creeps up on Jennifer Steyn on the beach while we get snuffling noises on the soundtrack and this builds up for several minutes, only for this to turn out to be Gavin Hood with seaweed over his head.
When Sean Barton does finally get around to playing things off – Jenilee Harrison finding Andre Jacobs hung upside down in a meat freezer, getting into a truck with Henry Cele only for his severed head to fall off – the scenes are rather on the schlock side. A big disappointment about the climax is that the witch doctor who issued the curse never emerges as the real threat at all and for some reason the film has Jenilee Harrison confronting a monster that emerges out of nowhere in the last moments. Certainly, the South African locations give a degree of authentic colour to the film.
The film hasn’t been able to afford many on the way of name actors. Aside from the one big name mentioned below, the film’s only star name is Jenilee Harrison whose only claim to fame before this was a supporting role in the later seasons of Three’s Company (1977-84) and as J.R. Ewin’s hillbilly wife on tv’s Dallas (1978-91) and who has subsequently eked out a living as a host for infomercials, you can see that we are not exactly in even B minus budget territory. That said, Gavin Hood who plays a supporting role did subsequently go on to become a director with high-profile films like X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009) and Ender’s Game (2013).
The surprise name among the cast is Christopher Lee – although considering how much time Lee spent deploring the horror genre after quitting Hammer, you have to wonder what persuaded him to sign onto Curse III. Nevertheless, Lee shows what he was paid for in a scene where he stands up and explains his belief in the witch doctor’s powers being due to how his sister became pregnant with a native child.
Trailer here