Maybe I’ve got a thing for 100-year-old widows, because the 59-minute wonder known as The Naked Witch did it for me. This, despite an overnarrated, history lesson disguised as a nine-minute prologue — a slideshow of encyclopedia illustration after encyclopedia illustration that is less about educating audiences on witchcraft through the ages and more about the filmmakers trying valiantly to push the running time over the one-hour mark and into feature-length. They did not.
No matter. Deep in “the hill country of Central Texas,” a college student (Robert Short, wooden as a 1914 set of Tinkertoys) researching his thesis is on his way to “a singing festival” when the gas gauge on his sports car points to “E.” He’s forced to hoof it to the closest “thoroughly German village,” where he learns the legend of the Luckenbach Witch. Ever the nosy tourist, he ventures to the cemetery in the dead of (day-for-)night to locate the reputed sorcerer’s grave.
Succeeding, he selfishly removes the petrified stake from her mummified corpse, thus bringing her back to life and in the shapely form of a beautiful young woman (Libby Hall, Common Law Wife) with pert breasts. We know this because, as the title has it, she’s starkers. Acquiring a see-through nightie, the heretofore nude enchantress embarks on a plot of murderous revenge on the ancestors of those who treated her so ill many moons ago.
All of this is done to a baseball-game organ score and no recorded sound. With Mars Needs Women’s notorious Larry Buchanan at the helm, would you expect anything less? (Oh, you would? Good, because you’ll get that, too.) It’s really saying something to call The Naked Witch as among Buchanan’s cheapest of concoctions, yet its once-risqué charm, embodiment of minimalism and absolutely bonkers concept combine for a thoroughly memorable exploitation experience. —Rod Lott
I see Andy Milligan coughed up a THE NAKED WITCH a few years later, though sometimes that one was THE NAKED TEMPTRESS. What’s more surprising is that one gets a higher IMDb rating than the Buchanan film…wonder how much that’s confusion on the voters’ part, and how much appreciation of the Milligan lack, as it might be put.
I’d really like to see the Milligan version now. It can’t possibly be as entertaining as Buchanan’s … can it?
Um, how could something called “The Naked Witch” not be entertaining?