MovieChat Forums > The Witches (1966) Discussion > Tight thriller becomes a bit loose towar...

Tight thriller becomes a bit loose toward the end.

posted 15 years ago by onnanob2
15 replies | jump to latest

POSSIBLE SPOILERS: I thought "The Witches" was a rather nicely paced, tight thriller that fell apart a bit at the end. I feel it slid a bit downhill after Joan Fontaine's character returned to the school after her stay in a nursing home. It seemed almost all of the mystery was then revealed in a premature manner. I also feel The sacrificial ceremony was too silly to be seen as menacing.

Joan Fontaine gave a very good performance. The film features good performances and good production values.

[–] 15 years ago

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[–] morganseer 13 years ago

I think the director had a hard time deciding whether the ending should be silly or serious. The ritual was silly, but then the priestess died, which made it serious. If he aimed for comedy, he should have made her exposed and ridiculed at the end, not dead.

[–] Balibari 12 years ago

Nice little film ruined by a ridiculous last reel.

If the writer made the 'witches' seem silly because believing in witchcraft/voodoo is silly, then why does he show it to be real at other times in the film?

[–] 12 years ago

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[–] josephbrando 12 years ago

They should most definitely have listened the director. This movie was quite eerie, and better still, intelligently eerie, for the first two-thirds....once they got to the sacrificial ceremony, the movie was completely ruined. The comedic satanic dance routine was just dumb - it ruined the entire movie.

[–] skiop 12 years ago

It was silly, but pretty hot: Plenty of sexy guys with their shirts ripped open and one looked like he was getting a hand job.

[–] Xcalat3 12 years ago

yeah it kind of loses steam near the end but still a very entertaining flick.

7/10

When there's no more room in hell, The dead will walk the earth...

[–] tali1 11 years ago

Seems to have inspired The Wicker Man.
Dunno about losing steam at the end as the bloody thing didn't have any in the first place!!!!!
2/10

Hey Witchdoctor, give us the magic words.
ooh ee ooh ah ah, ting tang wallawallabingba

[–] matthewwave-1 11 years ago

I really loved this film, with it's creepingly ominous tone of paranoia and threat, right up there with how The Seventh Victim and Rosemary's Baby reveal themselves to viewers... until the, yes, utterly ridiculous climactic sequence. It looked like a badly-staged dance sequence on a tv variety show.

And it wasn't funny, just ridiculous. Jarring changes in tone don't have to be bad things -- a lot of critics *hated* the way the Jack Fisk-directed Sissy Spacedout film Raggedy Man changed so completely in it's final act, but I thought it was brilliant. But, if the director here was going for comedy, he failed. He just ruined the superbly created tension that had come before and replaced it with a stupidly conceived and executed climax.

But, until then, I think it's a near-great film!

Matthew

[–] 12 years ago

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[–] jann-6 11 years ago

Just saw this on TCM and I agree wholeheartedly with the subject header of this thread. I didn't really see the ritual at the end as comedic, but rather, disturbing. I understand what people mean by comedic though, it's just that it was rather disgusting, really, and I didn't enjoy watching it. I reminded myself that this was not so much Satanism as it was something along the lines of the kind of African witchcraft Joan's character had witnessed years earlier. Looking at it that way it made a little more sense. But I still put this down in history as a pretty good movie up until the last 15 or 20 minutes or so.

[–] chet19 11 years ago

Onnanob2 (is there an Onnanob 1 ??) sums it up perfectly. It was mysterious and interesting right up to that point. Then all of a sudden, it got nutty. Especially crazy was when Joan Fontaine wandered into the coven, and then Miss Bax says "Okay, you're one of us now, Now we can tell you everything." She was one of them all of a sudden?? Huh?

[–] 11 years ago

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[–] Zipper69 11 years ago

The real clue comes in the opening credits with "choreography by....". The movie opens in Africa and is then transported to a "perfect" English village, once the witchcraft theme was hinted at it was clear than some variation on Pan's People was going to be prancing around during a ceremony.
This, unfortunately was par for the course in Brit movies of the Sixties, the idea of semi-naked people writhing around to drum beats was supposed to be "authentic"

The "Mummerset" accent adopted off and on by the locals was also a regular sighting. Make them simple country folk and they'd be in thrall to some woman with a cut glass accent !

Come on lads, bags of swank!

[–] phillindholm 9 years ago

An aerobics workout in a rescue mission.