The Witches
The Witches / The Devil’s Own (1966) Rewatch: ✅
The Witches is such a frustrating entry into the Hammer canon. The story it’s cribbing from (The Devil’s Own) is more than good enough, Kneale’s adaptation is enjoyable enough, Joan Fontaine is great and it has a superb chill smokey cat who gets the best, spookiest, scene in the entire film and could not give a toss because they are one hundred percent a cat.
All of this should make it bone shakingly brilliant folk horror stuff… then the finale happens and it’s like someone threw a party at a kid’s entertainers convention where only the worst performers were allowed to attend. The real horror is whoever is parping that horn.
Me being me, this is obviously funny as fuck to me and one hell of a way for a film to fly off the rails, but there is still that part of me that’s like “how good would this be if it didn’t fluff the ending?”, it would be really fucking great. But it isn’t. So it’s a film that spends ages building a mood then ends on whatever that is. Which is genuinely fucking great in and of itself and more than enough but still .. what if? Frustrating because I’d love both to exist but it can’t happen.
Oh well. You can’t have it all. parpppp