Gay-Darlene Bidart, the Love Witch:
No, The Naked Witch at hand here is, instead, an early directorial project of the infamous Texan schlockstmeister Larry Buchanan (31 Jan 1923 – 2 Dec 2004),* and, far from being lost, it is easily available online — at the Internet Archives, for example. Buchanan co-wrote and co-produced and co-directed The Naked Witch with the fellow Texan Claude Alexander,** an owner of a drive-in who was in desire of some exploitation product featuring a lot of nudity — so he hired Buchanan to help make a low-budget exploiter.
* Some sources list The Naked Witch as the directorial debut of Larry Buchanan, nee Marcus Larry Seale Jr., but according to his autobiography It Came from Hunger! (as well as to Psychotronic Video #24), prior feature-film projects include his lost directorial debut Grubstake (1952) and Venus in Furs (1956), the latter "a made-to-order adaptation of a Marquis de Sade story". If anything, then, The Naked Witch is Buchanan's earliest surviving feature-film directorial project. Prior to taking up direction, Buchanan briefly had a virtually non-existent career as an actor; indeed, the name by which he is known was given to him by 20th Century Fox. That career reached its apex when he played the lead, Homer, in the military "hillbilly musical comedy" short, Personal Hygiene.
_-_Title.jpg)
** From a wasted life's Babes of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls entry on Erica Gaven: "While not much can be found about Claude Alexander online, Brian Albright's book Regional Horror Films, 1958-1990: A State-by-State Guide with Interviews does offer an interesting and tragic bit of trivia in its entry on The Naked Witch: 'Producer Claude Alexander was involved in a car accident in 2002 that killed his then girlfriend [84-year-old] Peggy Moran, an actress who had appeared in The Mummy's Hand (1940 / trailer) [...]' and Horror Island (1941 / trailer) and The Mummy's Tomb (1942 / trailer). Claude Alexander, a protégé of Kroger Babb, remains elusive and obscure, but he seems to have died around 2007."
Personal Hygiene:
Buchanan himself once claimed (see: Psychotronic Video #24 [1997]) that he based The Naked Witch on the tale of the "Luckenbach Witch", a supposed local legend of the very area in Texas where he shot the film, but the truth of the matter is that he simply swiped, tweaked, and simplified the narrative from an obscure Finnish horror movie, Roland af Hällström's The Witch / Noita palaa elämään (1952 / trailer below). That Finnish film, which displays greater artistic intention than Buchanan's and is one of that country's first sound horror movies, was rather a scandal in its day due to its copious nudity and overt sexuality.* It also features a much larger cast: Buchanan's virtually non-existent alleged budget of $8,000 demanded a small cast, and he managed to shrink it down to well under a dozen that are actually given names (excluding, of course, the probably non-existent Saengerbund Children's Choir, which help pad the film by warbling a tune and prancing around in lederhosen and little-girl dirndls).
* Needless to say, the oft-quoted film history importance bestowed upon Buchanan's The Naked Witch by Heather Greene in her book Bell, Book and Camera: A Critical History of Witches in American Film and Television (McFarland & Co., 2018) that Buchanan's film is "the first to use the resurrected witch narrative and the ghost horror witch" should actually be bestowed upon the earlier Finnish film — or at least be amended as "the first American-made film to use the resurrected witch narrative and the ghost horror witch".
Noita palaa elämään:
Shot without sound, most of The Naked Witch forgoes dialogue in favor of narration, usually underscored by some extremely tacky Hammond organ music supplied by Raymond A. "Ray" Plagens (5 June 1924 – 23 May 1972), a regional talent. But before the movie ever even gets to it supposed tale, a good ten minutes are spent with a verbose and often factually incorrect lecture on the history of the witch, narrated by an uncredited and then-unknown Gary Owens (10 May 1934 – 12 Feb 2015) over a collage of pictorial details of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch (1450 – 9 Aug 1516) and, possibly, Pieter Brueghel the Elder.
Trailer to
The Naked Witch:
The actual narrative of The Naked Witch concerns the rather loquacious and feckless un-named student, played by future Christian minister (and author of both The Gospel According the Peanuts [1965] and The Parables of Peanuts [1968]) Robert L. Short (3 Aug 1932 – 6 July 2009),* who, while pursuing his thesis on the German villages of contemporary central Texas, ends up in the town of Luckenbach when his sports car runs out of gas. (At one point he claims the area is reminiscent of the area around the Rhine River in Germany, which only proves that he's never been to anywhere in Rhineland.)
In search of a room for the night, he meets the pretty blonde Kirska Schoennig (Jo Maryman), who not only sets him up for a room at an inn run by her grandfather Hans (Charles West) but also both tells him of the local legend of the Luckenbach Witch (Libby Hall a.k.a. Libby Booth**) and gives him a book about the legend. As might be expected, that night the un-named student wanders out, finds the witch's grave, digs the grave up, and removes the stake from her heart — because, well, that is what Texas college students do. As he runs away, she slowly regenerates, her atrocious make-up and hair perfect but clothing long gone.
* Interesting to note that almost every online obituary or biography of Mr. Short found online pointedly overlooks both his stage career and this movie, his only "acting" cum film credit, though one does briefly mention that he "worked as an actor, and was a director of religious dramas".
** According to Buchanan, (see Psychotronic Video #24), Ms. Booth was a direct descendant of the assassin John Wilkes Booth (10 May 1838 – 26 Apr 1865) as well as the founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth (10 Apr 1829 – 20 Aug 1912) — an amazing feat, seeing that the two men are not related. She ended up marrying The Naked Witch's soundman, S. F. Brownrigg (30 Sept 1937 – 20 Sept 1996), which would make her full name Elizabeth Ann Booth (imdb), a.k.a. Libby Hall Brownrigg (imdb). Brownrigg, of course, is [in]famous for his directorial debut drive-in hit Don't Look in the Basement (1973 / trailer) and his later Scum of the Earth a.k.a. Poor White Trash Part II (1974 / trailer). The short filmography of Ms. Booth/Hall, whom someone claims (in the trivia section of the film at imdb) was a nudist, also includes Buchanan's Common Law Wife (1961 / full film), the extremely obscure (and lost) cheapie Beauty and the Cave (1961 / trailer), and her son's cheapie sequel to her husband's first film, Don't Look in the Basement 2 (2015 / trailer).
Buchanan's The Naked Witch is not exactly the most exciting film out there, and it seems almost impossible that it took two people to put together a snoozer as dull and terrible as this turkey, but as crappy as this lump of extremely low-budget flotsam is, the movie does have an oddly surreal appeal, providing you are of a forgiving nature. As skin flick, The Naked Witch fails miserably because the nudity is as discrete as it is gratuitous, and as a horror film it fails miserably in that it is anything but scary. As most of the film is in voiceover, the acting is very much on the level of that found in a bad silent film, but as bad as that is the movie manages to do even worse the few time there is any real, poorly dubbed dialogue. (We had a good laugh at the student's reading of the suave line "With your good looks and something simple and black, you would look like a cameo," which he says to Kriska at one point.)
As a whole, The Naked Witch is amazingly boring despite its unintentional surrealism, with its extremely short running time of 59 minutes coming across as interminable. It does offer a decent bad-film giggle or two, all the more so if seen with a crowd — our favorite giggle scene is the witch's post-coital dance to bongo music — but it is difficult to argue that the movie is in any way worth viewing.
Again, however, those who are of a forgiving nature might find some mild enjoyment in the movie's oddly surreal and dreamlike atmosphere, something that is augmented both by the continual voiceover and the abnormally disjointed narrative and otherworldly logic and continuity. Unluckily, this occasionally noteworthy but obviously unintentional unearthliness is, as the accidental byproduct of a filmmaker whose talents leaned more towards Ed Wood than Luis Buñuel, too inconsistent to come even close to saving the movie.
As is apt to happen with exploitation films with great titles of any genre, in the seventies The Naked Witch got rereleased on the drive-in circuit as part of a double-bill with the 1969 cheapie The Witchmaker (1969), which got re-titled as The Legend of Witch Hollow.
Trailer to
The Legend of Witch Hollow:
To add confusion, The Witchmaker a.k.a. The Legend of Witch Hollow was itself eventually re-released as The Naked Witch...
No comments:
Post a Comment