Decent horror flick, but far from great
I guess this is the new breed of film Charles Band is going to stick to. Birthrite is released as a Shadow Entertainment release with Full Moon nowhere to be seen in the movie except on the DVD case. I heard a rumor that Charles Band was dropping the Full Moon moniker. I suppose Full Moon has become like Empire Films, it's precursor. I've seen every single Full Moon release there has ever been and I am pretty much now convinced it's all super low budget outings from here on. Hopefully there will be a small percentage of good ones in the bunch.I was expecting maybe a witch film like "The Coven" or "Equinox Knocks" which were both very low budget, yet quite entertaining. I did like Birthrite up until about 45 minutes into the movie. It got just a little ridiculous from there until the end of the movie. It took itself way too seriously about the "Powers" that it became mostly hilarious.
If there was a high point to the film it would be the first half of the movie which had cameos by veteran scream queens Julie Strain and Brinke Stevens. Julie Strain played a stressed out high school teacher, while Brinke Stevens played the adopted mother of Rebecca.
I won't say that Birthrite is not worth watching, it is entertaining most of the time for what it is. Just don't expect a masterpiece or anything. At least it had a better overall look than the recent Shadow/Full Moon films, and seemed to have somewhat of a larger production value. Hopefully the future films from Charles Band and Shadow Entertainment will get better...
score /10
Katatonia 25 April 2003
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0901641/35682
Pages:
[1]