Landon Hall | Through the Shattered Lens

Will Spanner (played, for a second time, by David Byrnes) returns in Witchcraft IX!

Will is still the son of a warlock, he’s still dead, and his girlfriend is still named Kelli (she’s played, this time, by Leah Kourtne Ballantine) but otherwise, the continuity of the entire franchise gets seriously twisted in Witchcraft IX. Witchcraft VII ended up with Will dead and everyone knowing that Will was dead. This was followed by Witchcraft VIII, which was a stand-alone film about a different warlock. Witchcraft IX then begins with no one knowing that Will is dead and an imposter Will living with Kelli and regularly choking her during sex. Will’s ghost roams the city, trying to get anyone to listen to him. Though Will was clean-shaven when he died, ghost Will has a beard.

While Will is trying to find someone who can hear him, Detective Lutz (Stephanie Beaton) and Garner (Mikul Robins) are investigating yet another series of ritualistic homicides. This time, the homicides are connected to an Egyptian cult as opposed to a Satanic one. Usually, Lutz and Garner would turn to Will for help but, because imposter Will is a jerk, they don’t want anything more to do with him. Of course, in Witchcraft VII, Lutz and Garner saw Will die but apparently, they’ve forgotten about that and think that he’s still alive. See how confusing this is?

Will finally does find someone who can hear his voice. She’s a prostitute named Sheila (Landon Hall) and soon, Will is using her to deliver messages to Lutz, Garner, and Kelli. He even enters her body at one point. Witchcraft IX is basically a softcore version of Ghost, with an Egyptian cult thrown in for good measure.

Whatever other flaws they may have had, the previous Witchcraft films all did try to maintain a recognizable continuity. That’s what made them stand out when compared to other direct-to-video franchises. Even though the actors changed, Will always remained the same character with the same problems. In Witchcraft IX, all of that continuity gets tossed out the window. The one emotionally effective moment of the entire franchise, Will dying and being mourned by everyone who cared for him, is retconned into nothing.

Witchcraft IX suffers from its low budget and its impossible to follow plot but Landon Hall and Stephanie Beaton are surprisingly good as Sheila and Lutz and David Byrnes is a passable hero. Though Will does come back to life at the end of this one, he would still be absent in the next film. In Witchcraft X, Detective Lutz would finally get a story all of her own.

When a new maximum security prison is finally ready to be opened and filled with dangerous criminals, Warden Glover (Arthur Roberts) gives a tour to reporter Tracy Quinn (Landon Hall). Unfortunately, the tour is interrupted when a group of terrorists led by Murdock (John Lazar, who is best-known for playing the homicidal record producers in Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls) infiltrate the prison and take over. Their plan is to set off a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles and trick the United States into a retaliatory strike against the Middle East.

Fortunately, the Warden is able to free the five prisoners who had already been transferred to the prison before it was taken over by terrorists. It’s now up to the prisoners to defeat the terrorists and defuse the bomb. They’ve only got an hour to prevent a war! Fortunately, the prisoners are being led by former CIA agent, Mace Richter (Paul Michael Robinson). Mace is only in prison because he was framed after a hostage rescue went wrong. (It turned out that the hostage was in on the plot so Mace killed him.) Amazingly, the terrorists from that operation are the same terrorists who have now taken over the prison. What a coincidence!

Maximum Revenge is a Fred Olen Ray movie so you know what you’re getting. The film rips off Die Hard by having Mace and the crew take out the terrorists one-by-one. Despite the fact that they’ve only got an hour to stop a nuclear bomb from going off, Mace and Tracy still drop everything so that they can have sex in one of the prison offices. It seems like that could have waited until after World War III had been prevented but then again, it’s a Fred Olen Ray film. No matter what else can be said about Fred Olen Ray, he knows what his target audience is watching for.

Paul Michael Robinson is not an extremely compelling action star and the fight scenes are pretty rudimentary. The prison is obviously an office building and the frequent inserts of the bomb very slowly counting down from 60:00 are good for a laugh or two. (Most bomb timers count down in seconds but I guess this one was meant to count down in minutes. At one point, though, the timer reads 16:86.) Even though the prison doesn’t appear to be that big and the terrorists aren’t that impressive, the timer is still somehow allowed to get all the way down to 00:01 before anyone does anything about it. That tells you all you need to know. The best thing about the movie are the end credits, which are filled with joke names. My favorite was the electrician named Sparks McGee.