There is a necromancer (Lois Masten) in Los Angeles, and she invokes demons for those who ask her to, not because she likes the money it brings in but because she loves being involved with the dark side of devilry. And when her clients come to her asking to call her demons off, she is enjoying herself too much to do so, as her aspiring necromancer neighbour Ernest (Waide Aaron Riddle) sees through the curtains hanging over her den in the garage. Today she has sent an axe into the head of one of her reluctant clients, and will soon be called on to help with a rape victim...
It's safe to say credibility wasn't the strong point of this low budget horror, essentially an eighties B-movie which took the seventies rape revenge exploitation genre and offered it a supernatural twist. The victim is one Julie Johnson played by Elizabeth Kaitan, here as Elizabeth Caytan, in one of her few leading roles from a brief career specialising in this kind of material not particularly blessed with great resources, but you couldn't say the role did her many favours. Indeed, although there were moves to take the subject of what to do if you're raped seriously, these were scuppered by the demon plot which trivialised the issue.
What happens is that drama student Julie is staying late in the college, having just met her tutor Charles (Russ Tamblyn, all hands), the one she had a crush on at the start of the course whereupon he took things further, although now she has a boyfriend her own age, Eric (John Tyler). Anyway, there are three others in the offices hoping to get a look at test papers for cheating purposes, but their scuzzy leader Paul (Stan Hurwitz) gets his hands on Julie's love letter written to Charles and senses a blackmail opportunity. Then they encounter her, chase her around a bit, and Paul rapes her while the other two look on, knowing she won't be able to tell anyone because of the letter they have on her.
This should have been pretty heady stuff, but it's difficult to get too engrossed when it frequently gets a bit silly, and that's down to the demon angle. Julie's friend Freda (Rhonda Dorton) spots the necromancer's ad in the newspaper (huh?) and off they go to her makeshift lair to ask for revenge on the men who violated her, but after a quick spell session where the woman's voice goes all deep and someone turns on a wind machine and a pink spotlight (and oh how they got their money's worth out of those) Julie and Freda decide they're better off out of there, make their excuses and leave. Ah, but it's too late, you see, for the damage has been done - the evil spirits have been roused!
Well, you get the idea, and in effect this takes the form of each of the men who have wronged Julie seeing her doppelganger who silently tries to seduce them, then all of a sudden has a big claw for a hand and er, that's about it aside from hearing the wrongdoer yell with lots of echo. You do finally get to see the demon's face, but it's a shoddy puppet, and the actual makeup and special effects are sparingly employed, the bulk of the plot resting on Julie's trials and tribulations with the often unpleasant men in her life. Signs that this is the eighties are the band who show up part of the way in to play power pop metal - Eric is on keyboards, though otherwise the music (by three people!) sounds like a cat running up and down a synthesiser. A few cheap laughs are on offer, but even those don't seem appropriate in light of the main spur of the plot being sexual assault, and the manner in which this is resolved could belong to any number of cheapo horror flicks of the era.
