05 May 2020

Season Of The Witch

After making the low-budget zombie classic Night of the Living Dead, George Romero followed up with Season of the Witch (the flick's third title—originally it was the rather vanilla Jack's Wife, then the more provocative softcore porny Hungry Wives).  This isn't anywhere nearly as good as NOTLD. It's a clunky occulter about bored, repressed middle-class American housewife Joan, who eventually finds the freedom to be true to thine own self through suburban American witchcraft. Romero tries to capture the absolute suffocating sameness of the American Way of Life, the horrible sterility, conformity, artificiality and tackiness (the characters are dressed in gruesomely exaggerated faux-'60s squares and hippies costumes, and their hairstyles are done in Ultra Aquanet and unwashed greasy), but he'd do it much more skillfully in his other zombie classic Dawn of the Dead. Here the script is too broad (occult, counter-culture and feminist themes are introduced and dismissed in haphazard fashion) and too rushed, with giant gaps in character development, in particular the main character’s jumbled psychosexual motivations.

The opening scene, the best in the movie, introduces us to Joan's unhappy, repressed life via a nightmare sequence.  Joan's biggest waking nightmare is her boorish male chauvinist pig/wife beater husband.  Joan looks like the perfect candidate for antidepressants until she is introduced by her loudmouth alcoholic friend to a New Age witch, who intuits Joan's various frustrations and suggests sorcery might be the cure for what ails her.

While Joan ponders whether to dabble in the occult, she runs into issues with her hippie daughter.  In one odd scene, Joan has a bizarre conversation with her daughter which ends with the daughter cooing compliments about mom's fine body.  Later mom meets her daughter’s boyfriend and they take an instant dislike to each other, but it's one of those *there's a fine line between love and hate* type of things. Soon thereafter Joan hears her daughter and the boyfriend having sex, and mom quickly rushes to her bedroom to masturbate! (And at this point, it’s really not clear whether she’s more turned on by her daughter or the boyfriend).

After lugging around for half the movie one of the fakest looking prop books in film history, How To Be A Witch, Joan finally decides to try out her own enchanting spell and picks her daughter’s boyfriend to be the beneficiary of her not-so-free love.  Oh, I forgot to mention Joan's also been tormented by visions of a threatening demon (somebody in a cheap rubber mask!). . .this is important because shortly after screwing the boyfriend on her living room floor, Joan mistakes her returning husband for the demon and shoots him.  She tells the police she thought hubby was an intruder.  The police are suspicious of the story, but have no way to disprove it and decide, rather cavalierly, not to charge her.  The increasingly ludicrous script mercifully ends as the newly independent Joan decides to join a coven, and in the final scene we regrettably get to see her nude and collared on her hands and knees before a devil’s altar. The End.
Oh, and the acting is terrible.

And the cast is ugly.

Joan, who I assume is supposed to be a hot '60s housewife, is acted by a woman, I guess, since it was filmed in 1970, but if it were filmed today I would swear the actor is a MTFT. 
There are a couple touches that make this mess barely less than a total disaster: Joan’s nightmare sequences are creepily surreal and create a decent atmosphere of dread, and her spells are at least as legit witchy-sounding as those of Rowena on Supernatural. Still I couldn’t recommend anyone actually sitting through this unless you were a big George Romero geek and absolutely couldn’t live without watching every film he ever made. The rest of us can content ourselves with his zombie flicks.

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