Give Charles Band a castle and a D-List celebrity and he’ll give you a movie!

In Spellcaster, which Band produced in 1988 but didn’t release until 1992, the castle is in Italy and there’s not one but three D-list celebrities.  British DJ Richard Blade plays Rex, who is a VJ on R-TV, a cable station that only shows music videos.  (A music station that actually plays music?  Imagine that!)  Bunty Bailey, who was the hot girl in Aha’s Take Me On video, is Cassandra, an alcoholic rock star.  Finally, Adam Ant is Signor Diablo, who owns the castle.

The plot of the movie is that R-TV is hosting a contest where the winners get to go to Diablo’s castle and not only meet Rex and Cassandra but also search for a million dollar check.  The contest winners are a snooty British woman, a sex-obsessed Italian, a sexy French woman, an overweight New Yorker, a blonde vegan, and a brother and a sister who could really use the money.  They are a collection of clichés and none of them are very interesting, sympathetic, or smart.  Not even the Italian notices that their host is named Mr. Devil.

The search for the money is a bust because the guests keep dying.  For instance, the overweight New Yorker eats a stuffed pig, turns into a pig himself, and then gets shot by the snooty British woman, who just happened to bring a rifle with her because all snooty Brits enjoy hunting.  Another person ends up getting eaten by a chair that has a lion’s head carved into it.  When the lion comes to life and chomps down its jaws, the teeth are obviously foam rubber.  It all has to do with Signor Diablo’s crystal ball, where he’s building a collection of souls.

With the casting Adam Ant and Bunty Bailey, Spellcaster tried to be a horror movie for the MTV generation but it came out several years too late.  By the time Spellcaster was released, grunge had taken over MTV and both Adam Ant and the Take Me On video seemed like relics from another age.  The film itself is a mostly dull affair, one that will be best appreciated by people who are nostalgic for the type of bad movies that used to show up on late night cable.