Curse III: Blood Sacrifice is woeful from start to finish.

Just a bad slasher film and I loved the second Curse film by the way. There's a long and arduous build-up before every attack and the killer and deaths not shown, just a raised machete. You see the creature at the end, but by then you don't care anyway. The initiating scene is silly, "I can't let this happen," like you could stop him if he persisted. He may have killed a goat just prior to you being there and may kill one right after you're gone. Christopher Lee doesn't add anything and is no better than anyone else in the film, you people are so bias.

Shot as Panga by director Sean Barton (who only directed this one movie, but has edited many more) on location in South Africa in 1989, this film was added to the Curse series of films. None of these movies are connected and you know, that's kind of how we like it. You can call it Witchcraft, Blood Sacrifice or Curse III: Panga, if you'd like.

Geoff Armstrong (Andre Jacobs) and his wife Elizabeth (Jenilee Harrison, Cindy Snow from Three's Company and Jamie Ewing Barnes on Dallas) are running a large sugar plantation in East Africa. Things go wrong when the sacrifice of a goat by the locals get interrupted and a witch doctor calls a demon from the sea that kills everyone in the Armstrong family except Elizabeth.

Elizabeth gets help from Dr. Pearson (Christopher Lee) and to break the curse she must lure the witch doctor into the sugar cane fields and set him on fire. Seems like a good plan, I guess.

The fish man is designed by The Fly special FX artist Chris Walas, so this has that going for it. It's not really all that exciting, nor is at as devoted to being entertaining weirdness like the first two films in the Curse non-series.

A hideous, slimy sea demon wielding a machete is summoned by an African witch doctor to punish those who interrupted a sacred sacrificial ceremony.

Yeah, I know it doesn't make much sense for a creature with vicious fangs and claws to use a machete to kill, but if that's his weapon of choice, who am I to argue? Either way, those who come face-to-face with the monster wind up dead, and, in the case of sugar cane plantation foreman Mletch (Henry Cele),minus their head.

Curse III: Blood Sacrifice delivers just enough gore to keep fans of cheezy horror happy, and chucks in two pairs of bare breasts for good measure, making it a passable way to spend some time despite a lack of originality in terms of plot and execution (I would loved to have seen the little girl get slaughtered for a change). Horror stalwart Christopher Lee is on hand to show the rest of the cast how to do this sort of nonsense, the actor starring as Dr. Pearson, who may or may not be somehow involved in the killings. Lee plays his character straight but still manages to chew the scenery, his performance sometimes dangerously teetering on the edge of hamminess but never going over the edge.

With such a silly monster one might easily forgive Lee had he played his role totally tongue-in-cheek: Chris Walas's rubbery creature is only seen in its entirety at the end and it's easy to understand why - it's not that great, nowhere near as effective as the similar slimy sea monsters in Humanoids From The Deep, with which it bears a passing resemblance. Director Sean Barton maintains a steady pace, and ends matters with a fiery climax that, if anything, looks spectacular. As a fan of really trashy horror, I would liked to have seen more of the fishy beast (no matter how bad it looks) and a tad more splatter (the attack on the couple bonking in a tent was rather weak given the messy aftermath discovered later on),but I appreciate that budgetary restraints can be an issue.

5/10. Passable monster fun for fans of '80s/'90s straight-to-video horror.