The premise was not without potential. A student has travelled to the village of Luckenbach in central Texas to research the customs of superstitions of the German community there. Not being an American I had no idea that there were lots of German settlers in central Texas back in the 19th century, and that even at the beginning of the 1960s German was still widely spoken there.
What the student (whose name we are never told) is really interested in is the legend of the Luckenbach Witch. This witch was a widow put to death for witchcraft in the mid-19th century. Naturally she not only cursed Otto Schoennig, the man who had denounced her, but all his descendants and she promised to return to have her vengeance.
Sometimes horror movie protagonists start out sane and end up crazy. Others are crazy right from the get go. This student seems to me to fall into the latter category so the first night he’s there he heads for the local graveyard, finds the which’s grave, digs her up and removes the stake that had been driven through her heart.
As you might expect she comes back to life (or maybe unlife) and sets out to exterminate the living members of the Schoennig family. In between slayings he enjoys some skinny-dipping in the local waterhole. The student watches her naked cavortings and falls for her charms.
Insofar as there’s a twist to this movie it’s the fact that the widow witch was pretty much entirely innocent (of witchcraft at least) and was the victim of her cowardly and vindictive lover, Otto Schoennig.
The exasperating thing about this film is that the ingredients are there for a fairly decent horror and/or nudie flick. The setting and the German background are interesting. Some of the locations are actually quite cool. The premise is thin but good horror movies have been made with much thinner premises.
The budget was minuscule - about $8,000. The one special effects scene is hopelessly amateurish but that’s just one brief scene. This is not a movie that relies on special effects. Parts of the movie have synchronised dialogue and part don’t. But the low budget isn’t the problem.
The problem is that it plays like a movie made by someone who had not the slightest idea of how to make a movie. Even that is not always a fatal weakness. Doris Wishman didn’t have a clue how to make movies but she still managed to make some entertaining movies.
Actually the Doris Wishman comparison is perhaps quite apt. If you look at a movie like Indecent Desires, which was the closest Wishman got to making a horror movie, it’s much more technically incompetent than The Naked Witch. In fact the film-making in The Naked Witch is not so much technically incompetent as just incredibly unimaginative. Indecent Desires is crazy and outrageous and it’s thoroughly enjoyable in its own slightly bonkers way. But there’s no sense of fun in The Naked Witch, no sense of the outrageous and (fatally) there’s no real craziness. Wishman didn’t know what she was doing she loved making movies and it shows.
The Naked Witch commits the one unforgivable sin. It’s dull.
Another problem is that Buchanan couldn’t seem to decide if he was making a horror movie or a nudie movie. There’s not really enough horror content for a horror film and there’s not enough nudity for a nudie film. Given the lack of directing talent on display here it might have been wiser to make it a fully-fledged sexploitation movie. If you don’t know what you’re doing then adding some naked women is probably a sound policy. It worked for Doris Wishman.
Something Weird have found a colour print of this film. It was shot in 16mm and blown up so the resolution was probably never much better than what we see here. Not a great colour print but it’s probably surprising the movie has survived at all. It’s released on a double feature disc with Crypt of Dark Secrets and a stack of extras which includes a director’s commentary track for The Naked Witch. Larry Buchanan was apparently really happy with this movie!
The Naked Witch is a curiosity. It had potential but it doesn’t quite make it.
As usual Something Weird have come up with plenty of extras including some brain-numbingly bizarre short subjects.
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