The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The Occult and Black Magic refers to the dark magical arts, demonology and associated practices. This covers much the same area as what is listed under Devil Worship but comes with no practice of the worship of Satan and associated attempts to give birth to his son.
Those who dabble in the occult will still worship and attempt to summon demons or sacrifice innocents. They also use ritual magic, are constantly attempting to call powers, enact rites or are engaged in the quest for objects of power (Occult Artefacts).
As with Satanists, occultists are prone to wearing black and/or scarlet red hooded robes and gather in secretive covens. Occultists frequently form Secret Societies and will infiltrate positions of power and influence.
Low-budget ingenue effort with pretensions to being more, this produces some occasionally nifty effects that quickly weary and only seem to hold up a thoroughly hackneyed B horror movie plot
Another of the unofficial sequels that bear slim to no resemblance to the Amityville Horror hoax. This is a cheaply made and not terribly scary British effort set in a asylum supposedly built on the site of the Amityville house
A blatant copy of The Craft where a new girl gets wound up into occult rites going on in a sorority house. Featuring porn star Ron Jeremy as a Catholic priest
A piece of filler horror that is utterly generic in every respect about travelers entering a sinister East European village where the locals are up to no good
German low-budget film about a resurrected sorcerer, this goes out on a wild edge, winds everything up to 15 on the dial and positively wades in blood, gore and torture scenes
This starts out was as a film about multiple personality disorder with several scenes that catch your attention before it drifts into a muddle of confused supernatural themes
This feels like mostly a series of horror tropes – ghost hunters with cameras in an abandoned building, backwoods occultists wanting the heroine’s baby – shuffled without originality
Saw series director Darren Lynn Bousman delivers a loopy cross between The Number 23 and an occult film whose sole selling point is the significance of the date it was released
Another of the ‘don’t __’- titled entries of the 1970s. This is a bizarre bad movie about teenage runaways in L.A.’s Griffith Park who fall prey to flesh-eating immortals
The sixth of the Halloween films, the fifth with Michael Myers. By now John Carpenter’s original eerie suspense has been reduced to crude slasher movie payoffs. This tries to add some nonsense about druidic cults
An adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story produced by Roger Corman. Alas giving it to exploitation director Jim Wynorski, who likes to add really well stacked women to everything does, kills all of Poe’s atmosphere
A film about a woman’s journey to a convent of sinister secrets that is aswim in religious imagery, although the film itself eventually proves to be all imagery with no coherent plot
Australian-made film about a heroine being drawn into occult conspiracies around her that only treads where Rosemary’s Baby went before
An adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft short story. While more faithful to the story than the earlier 1969 adaptation, the film is very cheaply made and collapses into the frequently ridiculous
The zombie film of the 2010s has become marked by a search for the most bizarre and incongruous title/conceptual mash-ups. True to its promise, the film pits several WWE wrestlers up against zombies, alas the creativity begins and ends with the mild amusement of the title concept
Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby was a classic film that popularised the modern interest in occult and deviltry on film; this sad remake is something that only parrots the cliches that have set in in the ensuing 46 years and clumsily mishandles all of Polanski’s comically edgy paranoia
One of the films from director Ted V. Mikels made not long afterRosemary’s Baby and mostly seems an opportunity for Mikels to lecture about historical witchcraft. Certainly, one of the great exploitation titles of all time
A Bert I. Gordon film with Robert Forster as a P.I. hired to search for a missing girl before finding she was mixed up with a modelling agency and the occult
An perfect example of 1970s exploitation cinema – a regional film made with no budget, a no-name cast and with all emphasis on the luridly sensationalistic. A crappy, badly made film on all counts
Very obscure horror anthology re-edited from episodes of a Canadian tv series featuring names like John Hurt, Charles Gray and Keir Dullea.
In one’s efforts to track down all Edward D. Wood Jr’s films, one finally comes to Necromania, which was believed lost for many years … This turns out to be a pornographic film, consisting of little more than serial sex scenes, this far less interesting because it lacks all of Wood’s typical gaffes and ineptitudes
Regarded as one of the worst films ever made, more than anything this is just dull and boring. The plot concerns a couple straying into a desert home where a warlock is about to be resurrected
Ridiculous cheap 1980s video release about a witch burned at the stake returned as a New Wave punkette to claims souls
A really shoddily Greek made film that imports Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence in a story concerning a cult of minotaur worshippers who are snatching tourists in a Greek village
Fascinatingly bizarre psychotronic film about an innocent drawn into the secrets of sexual witchcraft. Bad filmmaking on almost every level