Rent Legends of the Witches (1969)

Dumbledore wouldn't approve... - Legends of the Witches review by Count Otto Black

As anyone who has seen a few "underground cult classics" will know, what that phrase usually means is "cheap and amateurish but there's more sex and/or violence than you'd expect in a movie from this era", and sure enough, this is a very low-budget and rather dull documentary spiced up with a tremendous amount of nudity, though there's no sex unless you count a few symbolically sexy rituals, and no violence at all because unfortunately it was made over 300 years too late for the Witchfinder General to show up and make things interesting.

The lengthy historical sections rely on that technique beloved of low-budget historical documentaries whereby we are shown still images, in this case mainly old engravings of witches doing their thing and the Bayeux Tapestry, while the camera frantically pans and zooms in an attempt to suggest movement. As for their far-fetched version of religious history, it derives from a handful of very biased sources only slightly more reliable than Dan Brown. And the whole farrago of revisionist pagan flapdoodle is narrated by somebody with one of those all-purpose BBC voices of yesteryear who sounds as though he ought to be doing the voiceover on a documentary about industrial zinc production, and probably wishes he was.

Tedious and wildly inaccurate history lessons aside, this film is mainly an advert for the activities of self-proclaimed "King of the Witches" Alex Sanders, who was one of those attention-seeking fantasists who found loopy cults for reasons that seldom have much to do with spirituality. Judging by the number of attractive young naked people this scrawny middle-aged wizard surrounded himself with, I don't think his motives are all that hard to guess. As for his religion, it's such a pick-and-mix ragbag of everything from repurposed Neolithic shamanism to the Black Mass as performed by bored 17th-century French noblemen trying to be shockingly decadent that I ended up very much doubting whether he believed in it himself.

The movie is not completely without a kind of Dadaist appeal, occasionally resembling "Eyes Wide Shut" if it had been made by Ed Wood, especially the utterly bonkers psychedelic ritual at the end which really should have been filmed in colour. But I'm only going as high as two stars because this useless rating system allows no other score between "unwatchably putrid" and "pretty good". By the way, the DVD info is inaccurate. The length of the film is not 113 minutes, but only 1 hour and 13 minutes. Which is just as well, because those non-existent extra 40 minutes would have been at least 30 too many.