(1964)
Dir - Larry Buchanan/Claude Alexander
Overall: MEH
Part D-rent nudie flick, part Häxan remake, The Naked Witch is the only collaboration between Claude Alexander and schlock-peddler Larry Buchanan, the former never garnishing a single credit on another movie again. The first half is almost entirely a narrated history of witchcraft done by both an uncredited Gary Owens and the film's "star" Robert Short who takes over recanting his own tale of running across the title lady in a German Texas town while researching his thesis paper. After that, the pacing takes a substantial plunge as bad organ music plays through scene after scene of Libby Hall staring into the camera, bathing in a stream, dancing around, or frolicking with her shirtless new college student friend. The finale is laughably abrupt and anticlimactic, (Short yells at Hall to not kill another girl, she falls down, the end), but considering that this film was made for no other purpose than to have a tantalizing title as to scam a few bucks off of unsuspecting movie-goers, one should not be expecting much. At least the comparatively more fun and campy elements are presented up front as to not render the entire thing an insulting waste of time.
(1966)
Dir - Jack Hill/Stephanie Rothman
Overall: MEH
In the seemingly endless list of Roger Corman financed vehicles that were slapdash efforts of older, often foreign films spliced together with newly shot footage, Blood Bath, (Track of the Vampire), is one of the most legendarily mangled. Corman purchased the rights to an unfinished Yugoslavian spy thriller called Operation: Titian, but he found it to be unreleasable. Therefore, he hired Jack Hill to rewrite and film several new scenes, changing the title to the one that would eventually stick. Yet hilariously, this still was not good enough for Corman who then had Stephanie Rothman shoot yet more scenes which changed the narrative even further since lead actor William Campbell refused to come back for a third time, forcing the production to explain his character's change of appearance. Oh, and when the movie was sold to television, Rothman added still MORE scenes to pad it out past its theatrically released, sixty-two minute running time. As one could guess, the final result is a mess of continuity errors and narrative confusion, but astonishingly, it is not a complete trainwreck. Some of the sequences are chilling, the performances are decent, and it has an understandable off-kilter charm that mixes Corman's earlier A Bucket of Blood with cinematic vampire and witch trial tropes.
(1969)
Dir - Paul Wendkos
Overall: MEH
The first of two pilots which in turn became television movies for NBC, (the following year's Ritual of Evil serving as the sequel), Fear No Evil is a laborious and slow example of the post Rosemary's Baby boom of occult films which were turned out in droves across continents and with various budgets. Writer/producer Richard Alan Simmons adapted a story by Guy Endore with familiar elements like a cursed mirror and a clandestine black magic cult whose members are essentially bored, financially stable white people looking to summon demons for a hoot. Louis Jourdan plays one of only two characters who appear in each film, a suave psychiatrist who cracks the code of what is going on. Unfortunately, what in fact is going on is horrendously paced and ergo boring. The supernatural sequences are few and far between and not at all creepy when they do arrive, mostly involving Lynda Day George merely staring into a mirror where her recently dead fiance makes out with her. With so much talking revolved around such an uninteresting mystery with formulaic ingredients, there is very little here to recommend it above far better works of the era that involved diabolical witchcraft.
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