BY HANK REINEKE
As best as I can determine, Curse III: Blood Sacrifice was never screened theatrically, at
least not in the U.S. or England. It
seems to have been unceremoniously trafficked directly to home video in
1990. The owners of the film chose to best
capitalize on their investment by gamely resorting to placing full page
advertisements in home-video industry trade publications, an attempt to get VHS
retailers and rental stores to add the movie to their inventories. They boldly claimed in their promotional that
the film was a genuine “Horror/Thriller in the tradition of The Serpent and the Rainbow,†a
reference to Wes Craven’s and Universal Studio’s more celebrated voodoo film of
1988. And while Curse III bore no thematic – or even tangential - relationship to
the earlier “Curse†films (The Curse
(1987) and Curse II: The Bite (1989),
the ad boasted to retailers they had sold over “60,000†copies of this
semi-franchise’s first two films… so why not give this newest film – one featuring
the great Christopher Lee (described in their broadside as the “Master of
Suspense and Horrorâ€) - a fair shot?
Scorpion Releasing’s new Blu Ray of Curse III: Blood Sacrifice is, technically, not the film’s first
digital release. The film first appeared
on laser disc in 1990, courtesy of RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, and this
was soon followed by a more consumer-friendly VHS release originally retailing
for $59.95. It disappeared from shelves
soon thereafter, though it was infrequently broadcast in the US under the
film’s original title Panga and released
in the Beta format in the UK under the amended title of Witchcraft. The film would thereafter
languish in semi-obscurity until 2015 when MGM re-issued the film on a blandly
packaged DVD as part of the studio’s Limited Edition Series.
In truth, I wouldn’t have been happy paying $59.50 for
the video cassette of this title back in 1991. Having said that it’s not a terrible film by any means, but neither is
it a lost classic. Curse III: Blood Sacrifice was first and only film to be directed
by the British film editor Sean Barton. By the time his voodoo opus arrived on the shelves of Blockbuster and
other home video rental chains, Barton had already enjoyed a decade-long career
in the film industry. He was, perhaps,
best remembered among fans of fantastic films as one of three co-editors that
helped bring Star Wars: Revenge of the
Jedi to the big screen in 1983, but his résumé included work on an
impressive number of theatrical features before that.
Curse
III
would not only serve as the vehicle marking Barton’s directorial debut, but
also his first as co-screenwriter (having worked alongside South African
scenarist John Hunt). Their screenplay
was based on a story supplied by the Johannesburg-based actor and occasional
writer Richard Haddon Haines. If the
script’s storyline and characterizations are a bit thin, the film still manages
to move along at a pace brisk enough to satisfy the more forgiving horror film
devotees.