Rebecca is brought back from the brink of death by top secret agency 'Project 571'. She is trained as a lethal assassin and sent on missions to kill that which she has become, a vampire.
When Project 571 is destroyed by a gang of vampires, Rebecca is thrown into a quest for an ancient book powerful enough to raise the dead. Rebecca joins two priests on a journey to kill the master vampire Hugo Renoir before he can unleash the grotesque souls of the damned into our dimension. If Hugo is allowed to perform the ancient ceremony the earth shall forever pass into the realm of darkness.
Along the way Rebecca must utilise her training to face Vampires, Demons and Witches all vying for the book and its awesome power.
Yours truly knew she’d be far from impartial as soon as Stephanie Beacham’s name was flashed on the credit crawl. Beacham, a torrid presence in the Hammer and Amicus films (DRACULA A.D. 1972, AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS), was also a staple in modern Grand Guignol helmed by Brit director Pete Walker (HOUSE OF MORTAL SIN, SCHIZO, et al). Though she’s a fine actress, Beacham’s bosom effortlessly stole scenes in period pieces that insisted upon decollage. I remember a TV miniseries, NAPOLEON AND JOSEPHINE: A LOVE STORY, where Beacham’s cleavage was positively epidemic–I thought it was going burst our of her bodice and crash into my living room. And her nudity in THE NIGHTCOMERS fueled the horror film’s hard sell (critics pounded the film’s incestuous bond between two juveniles). Beacham is a bombshell but, unlike today’s dime-a-dozen bimbos, she is talented.
Gauging her appearance in THE WITCHES HAMMER, the 60-year-old Beacham is still sexy though her "goodies" are spared even a cameo appearance. She opts to deadpan her lines in a demeanor that invokes Henry Daniell and the fun is infectious. As Madeline, she hangs around vampires whose porcelain, fanged smiles suggest they pig-out on Orbitz during the daytime. This U.K. import extrapolates the carnage of the Hammer era; vampires blow-up real good (we’re talkin’ chest cavities the size of Bill Clinton’s ass) and there’s a surplus of martial arts action (indispensable, it would seem, to kickin’ undead ass. I recently screened Yorgos Noussias’ TO KAKO [EVIL] where a cabbie, a jaded girlfriend and other survivors of a zombie plague inexplicably develop chop-socky skills. Go figure).
 
Not unlike RAZOR BLADE SMILE, the central character is an apprenticing (genetically engineered) vamp who functions as an assassin and indulges herself with butchy girl power. Though saddled with a shoestring budget, WITCHES HAMMER cuts through the cheese with a tongue-in-cheek drollery (as evinced by the dialogue: "We are about to get wiped-out and all you can say is ‘Oh!’"). The film’s expenditures are sagely invested in the sets and props that recount the history of a surrogate Necronomicon. Happily, the film compromises its camp with scenes that are poignant (vampiric Claudia Coulter, presumed dead, watches her family mourn at her grave) or gags that invoke EC comics (a corpulent chick watches a fight while sipping blood through two straws, both lodged within a victim’s throat).
While films like UNDERWORLD lean on an intoxicant surplus of CGI, THE WITCHES HAMMER opts for story. I only wish that director/screenwriter James Eaves would have afforded more exploration into the myth of the female vampire (nothing to date has matched the intense rage and melancholy of THE GIRL WITH THE HUNGRY EYES [1995], Jon Jacobs’ lament of the dead). Eaves’ film may not be cutting edge but, unlike Eli Roth’s hemorrhaging vision, it has a heart; his milieu orbits somewhere between a comic book and Luc Besson fantasy (the film evokes LEON in its conclusion, what with a midget vampire, grieving his crispy lover, expiring in the daylight).
Stephanie Beacham, please come home to the genre. The Hammer women (Beacham, Caroline Munro, Veronica Carlson) may be older but they’re still beautiful and they still deport themselves with dignity. Time has validated that their successors are pale and already forgotten imitations.
By Alexxus Young
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2006
DIRECTOR: James Eaves
WRITING CREDITS: James Eaves
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Stephanie Beacham, Claudia Coulter, Andrew Cullum
COUNTRY: UK
RUNTIME: 91 min
RATING: 6/10
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