Witchcraft VII: Judgement Hour Plot Breakdown

Witchcraft VII: Judgement Hour, also known as Witchcraft 7: A Taste for Blood, is a 1995 horror film directed by Michael Paul Girard. This is number 7 in the Witchcraft series and, to be fair, it is not a series I am familiar with. The film stars David Byrnes, April Breneman, Loren Schmalle, Alisha Christensen, and Ashlie Rhey.

The seventh instalment in the WitchCraft film series, it was produced by Vista Street Entertainment and released direct-to-video on December 27, 1995 by Troma Studios. The script was written by Peter Flemming.

Somehow they managed to lower the production values of the series here. Worst instalment to date as Will Spanner battles vampires trying to acquire blood banks in a business merger. Low budget soft porn.

Instead of warlocks or Satanists trying to summon the Devil we have a vampire trying to take over the world’s blood supply thru a corporate merger. The filmmakers here certainly weren’t trying to tell a story or develop characters. My only guess is that these flicks could be rented to horny teenage boys who weren’t old enough to get behind the magic curtain aka. the adult section.

Let’s see So far, the Witchcraft series has pitted its warlock-attorney hero against a synthetic succubus; a hell-spawned soul-sucker; a diabolical, organ-harvesting musician’s agent; and two apocalypse-invoking wizards in rapid succession— to say nothing of ancillary threats like devil-cults, serial killers, and the occasional burly street tough. What does that leave for Witchcraft VII: Judgement Hour? How about vampires?

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There’s a party going on at the headquarters of the Los Angeles-based Polytechnic Institute. Rachel wanders off into a relatively secluded room, where she is accosted by a well-dressed man with long, flowing blonde hair (Loren Schmalle). The filmmakers act like his identity is supposed to be some kind of big mystery, but you may rest assured that it will not spoil what little appreciation you might develop for anything to come if I tell you right up front that his name is Martin Hassa, and that he’s the boss of the Polytechnic Institute. He’s also a vampire, and after a long and tedious sex scene that is in no way enlivened by either the trying-too-hard background music or the “erotic” employment of a glass of milk, Hassa reveals his fangs and drains the prostitute’s blood.

Meanwhile, married couple Jack and Emily have summoned their friend and lawyer, Will Spanner, to the hospital, where their teenage son is in intensive care after being hit by a drunk driver. This actually has nothing to do with anything, although screenwriter Peter E. Fleming will try very hard to convince us otherwise throughout the remainder of the film. What does matter is that Spanner is present when the EMTs rush Rachel to the emergency room, giving Sally a chance to grab him and rant incoherently about finding the other girl unconscious and apparently dying on a table at the party they’d been attending.

Spanner watches through a window first as the doctors fail to save Rachel, and again as the priest who comes to perform her last rites has his rosary succumb to spontaneous combustion in his hand. Will whips out his phone at that point, and calls Lieutenant Lutz (Alisa Christensen— usually a stuntwoman, but she also had a pretty big role in Sisters of Sin), his contact on the police force.

When Lutz gets Spanner’s call, she and her partner, Garner (now played by John Cargen, of Stranger in My House), are in the middle of a stakeout. Their captain believes that a certain escapee from San Quentin will most likely seek out his girlfriend , and thus it is that the two detectives are perched on a balcony opposite the girl’s apartment, perving on her through the bedroom window with a telescope.

As soon as Lutz and Garner have made their bust (they considerately wait until after their quarry has attained orgasm), they bop over to the hospital to see what has Spanner’s panties in such a bunch. Lutz and Garner don’t see why a girl who supposedly died of a heart attack at a party is their problem, and the discovery of what they take for the bite of a large snake on the corpse’s neck doesn’t impress them much, either. What does impress the two cops— and Spanner too, for that matter— is when Rachel opens her eyes, gets up off the gurney, and kicks all three of their asses without breaking a sweat.

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Spanner, Lutz, and Garner head off in pursuit, eventually locating Rachel in a park, where she has just made a nice breakfast out of a horny jogger. Their efforts to take the girl into custody accomplish nothing but to establish her imperviousness to nine-millimeter bullets, but Spanner enjoys more success when he squares off against her with a long, pointed stick.

The remainder of Spanner’s morning won’t be much more enjoyable. Keli has been waiting up for him all night, and she’s convinced herself that Will spent the last twelve hours or so in the company of another woman. Don’t ask me why Spanner cooperates with his girlfriend’s efforts to pick a fight instead of just explaining what he’s really been up to; don’t ask me why his response to the emotional strain of the argument is to drive out to the cemetery and fly into hysterics over his mother’s grave.

The blue-ribbon example of not thinking hard enough comes when we finally learn what Martin Hassa’s agenda is. It comes out in conversation between Hassa and his sidekick, Costanza (Eryk Sobesto), that the vampire is negotiating the merger of his company with a firm called Kobol International, the object being to put himself in command of the nation’s supply of donated blood.

Anyway, Rachel’s suspicious (to say the least) behavior, combined with what she was doing on the night of her official death, brings Hassa under scrutiny from Spanner, Lutz, and Garner. When the three investigators get their hands on a tape from the security camera in the room where Rachel had her tryst with the vampire, and see her getting it on with somebody who doesn’t show up on film, Will recognizes immediately that they’ve got a vampire on their hands. On the other hand, the very act of acquiring that tape brings Spanner and his cop buddies to Hassa’s attention, and he’s the kind of guy to whom you’d really be better off remaining unknown.

A vampire, Martin Hassa (Loren Schmalle), is attacking young women in the Los Angeles area, and while at a party, he attacks and leaves Rachel (Ashlie Rhey) for dead. Jack (Mark Blydel) and Emily (Aline Kassman) have summoned their friend and lawyer, Will Spanner (David Byrnes) to the hospital as their child was hit by a drunk driver. An investigation into Rachel reveals a plot by Hassa to control the nation's blood supply, leading to the deduction that Hassa is a vampire.

Read also: Urdu Article: Understanding Witchcraft

Suspicious, Spanner calls LAPD Detective Lutz (Alisa Christensen), who with partner Detective Garner (John Cragen) head to the hospital in time to see Rachel rise from the dead. Rachel overpowers Spanner and the two detectives, and a pursuit of Rachel by the Detectives only shows that bullets will not stop her, resulting in Will staking her.

Hassa possesses and forces Keli to attack Will. Spanner, Lutz and Garner manage to foil these plans at the last minute, but not without the death of one of the trio of investigators as Will stakes Hassa but is mortally wounded himself.

Will is now a prosecuting attorney making it four different types of law he has practiced in the last five films for those counting. Detective Lutz is now a woman.

Poster for Witchcraft VII: Judgement Hour

Spanner stumbles onto the vampire plot purely by accident, coincidentally being at the hospital defending a kid who’s the victim of a hit-and-run-only to abandon him the second a girl screams for help when her dead friend suddenly comes back to life at the morgue. A chase ensues (with a random sex scene featuring a jogger, naturally), leading to Spanner teaming up with the detectives to take on the Romanian vampire overlord (Loren Schmalle), who has a truly diabolical plan: merging two insurance companies so he can control the blood supply from all transfusions!!

Another week, another "Witchcraft", except... there are no warlocks or witches in sight. Instead, this one revolves around an ancient aristocratic vampire sinking his fangs into the necks of big-bosomed ladies. For a franchise diving deeper and deeper into soft-erotic sleaze, a horny vampire actually feels like a perfect fit, as this entry jumps from one "action-packed" nude or sex scene to the next. And quite creatively, too! Everything gets eroticized-objects included-whether it's environmentally conscious iron straws dripping milk onto breasts, a police flashing light, or even a bowtie.

A police stakeout has never been this exciting, a simple phone call somehow leads to a sex scene, and visiting an eyewitness turns into a full-blown dominatrix affair. Phew! But fear not! A guy (James MacKinnon) is credited for practical make-up FX, delivering neck wounds, a stake through a torso, a decapitation, and a schlocky vampire puppet (woohoo). The face-morphing VFX and a hilariously bad PNG of a guy falling into swirling hellfire will also dazzle you with their undeniable '90s charm.

Directed by Michael Paul Girard-who returns for part 9-this film comes from a man well-versed in boner sex comedies like "Over-Sexed Rugsuckers from Mars" (1989), "Getting Lucky" (1989), and "Bikini Med School" (1994).

And yes, Will Spanner, our favorite lawyer/warlock, is back, baby! This time, he's played by David Byrnes, who happens to look a lot like Dutch stand-up comedian Hans Teeuwen. Once I made that connection, I couldn’t unsee it. His girlfriend Keli (April Breneman) is once again wildly bipolar, flipping from jealous and angry to horny as hell in seconds-conveniently ensuring even more sex scenes (no complaints). The two police detectives from part 666, Lutz and Garner, are also back. They're still a pair of perverts refusing to play by the book, though Lutz is now played by a woman (Alisa Christensen). Meanwhile, Garner has been recast, with John Cragen stepping in-though he doesn’t pull off the pervert act as naturally as his predecessor.

Main character Will Spanner is played by David Byrnes, who would return for Witchcraft IX: Bitter Flesh. Director Michael Paul Girard also returned to helm Witchcraft IX. Detective Lutz, a male character in the previous film, Witchcraft VI: The Devil's Mistress, is retconned into a female character and played by Alisa Christensen, although a later episode describes this character as a relative.

Artistically desolate... Attorney Will Spanner is drawn, quite by coincidence, into some pro bono work when he encounters a vampire victim at the hospital and brings in the police to investigate. The police captain is quite skeptical--rightly so--of any lawyer helping the police department for free. The vampire angle simply never belongs in the Witchcraft series.

This movie also has zero kills and gore with the best you can hope for is some store-bought costume teeth and a trickle of blood. The one big effect they try is when the vampire turns into a bat or some shit like that. It is rubbery and looks awful. A few other random things. William is played this time by David Byrnes, who was in Intruder. I’d much rather be watching that. Also, inexplicably they not only recast Lutz but gender swapped the character who is now a woman. Why not just make a new character and not confuse us? Well, that would have required someone who knew how to write a script so never mind. Finally, I just felt creepy watching this movie. Not because of the nudity but because of the incessant zoom in close up shots of panties. This is by far the worst of the lot so far and if you have read my other reviews, you know how big of a deal that is.

Spanner's use of his powers is very limited in the film.

Another week, another "Witchcraft", except... there are no warlocks or witches in sight. Instead, this one revolves around an ancient aristocratic vampire sinking his fangs into the necks of big-bosomed ladies. For a franchise diving deeper and deeper into soft-erotic sleaze, a horny vampire actually feels like a perfect fit, as this entry jumps from one "action-packed" nude or sex scene to the next.

These movies remain horny, entertaining, and gloriously schlocky-even if this seems like the final chapter for Will Spanner.

It had been intended to end the Witchcraft series with this installment. R.I.P William Spanner. If only that were true. Why did they keep making these movies?

Watching it, it is extremely easy to imagine director Michael Paul Girard handing over the completed picture to producer Michael Feifer and saying, “Here, look— boobies. Now can I have my fucking paycheck, please?” There’s no energy, no suspense, no momentum. The movie just wanders from scene to scene, killing time until the next pair of bare tits arrives, and even then, Girard merely goes through the motions more often than not. Even the ending, which by rights ought really to have come as something of a shock, just sits there, making nothing at all of the one chance this series ever had to engage its audience.

The cast is not so uniformly worthless as their counterparts in the previous episodes (in fact, I’ll go so far as to say that Alisa Christensen could have a real acting career if she ever gets tired of making her living by falling out of windows and jumping from moving cars), but they too seem bored and uninvolved. Ditto the artisans from the Goblincraft special effects house, whose monster makeup for Hassa’s final-act transformation into the expected bat-creature stands only slightly above the dime-store demons of Rock ’n’ Roll Nightmare.

The next film in the series is Witchcraft VIII: Salem's Ghost, although it is a standalone film and not a direct sequel.

Critical Reception

Critical reception to the film was mostly negative. AllMovie gave Witchcraft VII: Judgement Hour 2.5 stars out of 5. In a one star review, TV Guide said that it offered "little in the way of thrills or imagination" and that the series had "strayed so far from its original conception that there's no actual witchcraft in this instalment". In October 2015, Katie Rife of The A.V. Club named the film the fifth-best in the (then 13-film long) series, saying that it had a "nice mid-’90s feel to it".

Still from the Witchcraft movie series

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