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Not a banshee but a sidhe, not Poe either despite a sprinkling of text at the onset, definitely an Age of Aquarius fever in 16th-century England. The trial of the maiden accused of witchcraft goes into Rossellini's Blaise Pascal, she's branded and whipped and placed in the stocks as ordered by the cruel magistrate (Vincent Price). His opposite number is the forest sorceress (Elisabeth Bergner) whose sect turns from whimsy to vengeance after a slaughter, the target is not just the tyrant but his whole family, "cursed from Hell to Christmas." The scion (Stephan Chase) brutally helps himself to wenches as well as to his fragile stepmother (Essy Persson), his brother (Carl Rigg) returns from Cambridge to join the savagery while his sister (Hilary Dwyer) protests in vain. The gentlest member of the abode is the stable lad (Patrick Mower), naturally chosen to be the pagan avenger. "We can make you die a minute every day for a year, or all in one bloody minute." An Artaudian miniature by Gordon Hessler, the bleak panoply of the age painted in handheld slashes. ("Establishment," "Witches" and "Villagers," as the credits have it, different parts of the rabid dog.) The casting of Price is thematic, Reeves' Witchfinder General mainly but also Corman's The Masque of Red Death for the banquet pierced by the howl of fear. Bacchanalia under tombstones, tour of the torture chamber. Religion old and new and the barbarities done in its name, plenty of work for the tippling gravedigger (Hugh Griffith) who filches from corpses and shrugs at ancient warnings ("It don't even rhyme"). The lycanthropic shadow will not stand for unfinished business, thus a carriage to oblivion for the stinger. "Now you have blood on your soul!" Franco runs parallel with The Bloody Judge. With Sally Geeson, Marshall Jones, Andrew McCulloch, Michael Elphick, and Quinn O'Hara.
--- Fernando F. Croce |