Demon Witch Child (1975)
Review by the Film Fiend
The best thing about being a self-proclaimed bad movie fanatic is that you’ll never run out of low-quality cinematic endeavors to satisfy the unsightly three-eyed beast performing cartwheels in your degenerate tummy. Thanks in part to the increasing number of budget-line DVD compilations produced by a host of quasi-respectable distributors, we the people of United States of Campy Goodness will never have to worry about where the next fix of pure, uncut cornball entertainment is coming from, especially if you’re one of the many who have invested wisely in any of the public domain collections currently awaiting your undivided attention. As long as you are willing to accept quantity over quality, your dodgy days and sleepless nights will swim in a bottomless sea of inoperable celluloid cancer.
Plucked violently from the inky black innards of Videoasia’s enjoyable trash movie collection The Grindhouse Experience comes Amando de Ossorio’s savagely uninspired supernatural chiller Demon Witch Child, also known in certain abstract cultures as simply The Possessed. Since none of the films contained deep inside this impressive set are described anywhere on the packaging, I had absolutely no idea what I was in for. Had I painstakingly submitted an educated guess to a shadow committee devoted to random useless information, I seriously doubt my theory would have contained the phrase “an unintelligible hybrid of The Bad Seed, The Exorcist, and The Omen.”
If you’ve seen one of these incredibly opportunistic knock-offs, you’ve seen them all.
Here’s the vaguely demonic lowdown: After getting pinched for stealing an assortment of adorable trinkets from a local church, a disturbingly deformed gypsy witch-hag tosses herself out of a second-story window and immediately drops dead. Naturally, her untimely suicide has thrown a poo-flinging monkey wrench into her coven’s plan for satanic world domination, prompting her second-in-command to take matters into her own blood-stained hands. After tricking a naive young lady into accepting a number of sinister pagan relics as gifts, these black cloak-wearing she-beasts wait patiently for their master to make her triumphant return from beyond the grave. Thankfully, it doesn’t take long for things to get more than a little unholy.
Before you can say Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria syndrome, our poor little unsuspecting tweeny is metamorphasizing into a pint-sized version of the aforementioned witch-hag, complete with misshapen moles and receding hairline. Her first order of business: castrate a newborn baby during a nighttime ritual. Unfortunately, their nefarious scheme requires a child that has not yet been baptized, forcing the possessed lass to sniff out a new victim. Along the way, she’ll murder a few select individuals, cut off another useless penis, and arouse forgotten feelings of unadulterated passion in the town’s wayward priest. Can the citizens figure out what’s going on before this twisted prepubescent troublemaker strikes again?
Demon Witch Child is so incompetent, so impossibly ill-conceived that I honestly have no idea how to accurately describe it to those who’ve yet to experience its magic. Do I ramble on at-length about the scenes which stumble and tumble and fall into the legendary Pit of Pointlessness? Do I dazzle you with well-developed sentences which pontificate arrogantly about the story’s exhaustive collection of borrowed ideas? How about expounding wildly about the poor production values, the mind-numbing dialogue, or the clueless nature of its cast of obscure actors? It’s hard to find your footing with a flick like this. Though I hate to employ such a cliched phrase, you really have to see this abomination for yourself to completely understand how wonderfully insipid it truly is. No joke.
Oddly enough, the make-up effects are surprisingly effective despite their glaring lack of adequate funding. Watching an elderly spoiled brat brutally terrorize her father, her nanny, and anyone who happens to wander absent-mindedly into the frame is strangely satisfying. Her seduction and subsequent murder/castration of a newspaper reporter is also quite disturbing, more so when you realize exactly what she intends to do with the poor bastard’s detachable penis once she’s bagged it up. Additionally, the film’s highly unexpected conclusion is somewhat jarring, even when compared to the landmark motion pictures director Amando de Ossorio has lifted the majority of his ideas from.
The sparkling bow on the pretty cinematic package, of course, is the dubbing. It’s state-of-the-art pathetic, yet somehow pleasing to behold. I think I spend too much time indoors.
Unless you happen to enjoy unbelievably awful motion pictures from around the world, there’s no earthly reason to waste a second of your precious time with Demon Witch Child. My advice: gather your entire extended family and watch the classic films that inspired it, instead. However, regardless of the production’s complete inability to deliver anything that even remotely resembles a cohesive motion picture, I enjoyed the hell out of it from start to finish. It’s one of those bad movies that just begs to be passed around the office mailroom, allowing everyone with the slightest interest in dodgy cinema to experience its unmatched awfulness for themselves. Why keep such an inglorious work of art all to yourself — lovingly spread the disease around the room so others may hear the word.
Father Juan will graciously pray for your souls next Sunday.
Popularity: 3% [?]
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