The
She Beast
Transylvania
under the People’s Republic as in ages past the witch superstition.
A very droll and
amusing construction (Von Helsing is a dispossessed Count, a bright
young English couple pass through on their honeymoon).
The second unit
director brings with him Mel Welles as the innkeeper Ladislav Groper.
Ian Ogilvy,
Barbara Steele, John Karlsen, et al.
It “isn’t a good
film by any stripe” (Sight and Sound).
The Sorcerers
A very fine
analysis of Furie’s The Ipcress File, mind control is the idea, Dr.
Monserrat (Boris Karloff) invents an electronic apparatus that gives it to him,
his wife and colleague (Catherine Lacey) is however not of the same mind as to
the proper scope of its use, they are an aged, poor couple, he works as a
hypnotherapist out of their London flat.
The subject (Ian
Ogilvy) is bored with the club scene and might have stepped out of Buńuel’s Simon
of the Desert, his physical sensations provide a vicarious thrill for the
couple.
“Crude filmmaking
and rotten acting” from “possibly the most overrated figure in British genre
film,” says Michael Atkinson (Village Voice).
Witchfinder
General
Matthew Hopkins
(Vincent Price), a sobersided picaresque rogue, toys with the idea of a
national appointment as he roams the English countryside on a warrant from
Parliament and a mission dating back as far as James I.
He hangs a priest
at the town’s insistence and is paid in silver for it. The dead man has a
pretty niece Hopkins toys with, too. She has a lover (Ian Ogilvy) in the
Roundhead army who takes a solemn vow of revenge.
The absolute
positions of the several parties, starving Cavaliers and feasting Roundheads,
Hopkins’ sturdy imposture and his man Stearne’s instantaneous brutishness, the
lover’s intransigence, the credulity of the people, make up all the elements of
the drama, the thing is very like a Western.
Instruments of
torture are not used, only bloodied fists and the sharp prick for witch’s
marks, also the ordeal by immersion or hot iron, finally burning.