Crew
Directors/Screenplay – Claude Alexander & Larry Buchanan, Producer – Claude Alexander, Photography – Ralph Johnson, Special Music – Ray Plagens, Optical Effects – Cineservice of Hollywood. Production Company – Alexander Enterprises.
Cast
Robert Short (The Student), Libby Hall (The Naked Witch), Jo Maryman (Kirska), Howard Ware (Franz the Miller), Denis Adams (Otto Schoening), Charles West (Hans Schoening), Marilyn Pope (The Librarian)
Plot
A student travels to the small town on Luckenback in Central Texas where the locals are descendants of German immigrants. He is researching folklore about witches. He is welcomed by Kirska whose father runs the inn. He is told the story of Otto Schoening who liaised with a woman accused of using witchcraft who seduced him from his ailing wife, before the woman was taken away and staked by the locals. The student finds the witch’s grave and pulls the stake from her corpse. This causes her to return to life. She now passes through the town, seeking vengeance against the Schoening descendants.
The Naked Witch was the first film from director Larry Buchanan (1923-2004). Buchanan’s other films are usually considered right down there with those of Edward D. Wood Jr in terms of quality. These include The Eye Creatures (1965), Curse of the Swamp Creature (1966), In the Year 2889 (1966), Mars Needs Women (1966), Zontar: The Thing from Venus (1966), Creature of Destruction (1967), It’s Alive! (1969), Mistress of the Apes (1981) and The Loch Ness Horror (1982). He co-directs here with Claude Alexander.
The Naked Witch was made as a nudie – the precursor of the porn film that mostly consisted of scenes with women walking around topless or fully nude (but nothing more than that). All of that said, the only viewing copies available around the internet are very poor-quality, low-resolution ones. They are also copies where black bands appear across sections of the screen whenever the nude Libby Hall walks around the fields. We do get some brief toplessness when we see her swimming in the lake – even then, the quality of the print is so poor that you can barely see anything more than a vague outline.
The IMDB makes the claim that The Naked Witch was the first film to depict a witch returning from the dead. This is simply untrue – Buchanan and Alexander could well have taken influence from the British City of the Dead (1959) and the Italian Black Sunday (1960), which had come out before several years before this was made. Even if you are talking about only American films, there was the light fantasy treatment I Married a Witch (1942) a whole two decades earlier.
The film comes with a very long narrated preamble – one that lasts for eight-and-a-half minutes – that tells the history of witchcraft. What is rather amusing is how Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-10) is used to illustrate this. The meaning of the painting’s surrealistic imagery is not known but it is generally believed to be an allegory dealing with Christian sin and temptation. In the narration, the half-human creatures are said to be witches transformed into animals, the rest evidence of their debauchery and the towns on fire in the background a depiction of witch hunters conducting purges. It almost for a time feels like we are in the midst of a modern version of Häxan (1921).
The Naked Witch is a very poorly made film. You could give Larry Buchanan some credit, it was his first film but for the fact that he never much improved over the rest of his career. The music feels like elevator music. Much of the early sections come in voiceover, which is usually a sign that a film has no money for ADR or the soundtrack was lost, although we get some dialogue scenes at various points.
Far worse though is that Buchanan and Claude Alexander have no idea between them of how to stage anything dramatically. They simply point the camera at a scene and let actors say their lines at each other. There is little to no editing, nothing that takes you into a scene – no doubt the results of a quick shooting schedule. The witch is revived and kills a few people but the film fails to make anything interesting out of this. Even the nudie scenes that are what an audience has supposedly come there do not begin until the witch is revived at the 32-minute point.
The film’s release date is unclear (I have gone with 1964 as the most commonly cited of these – the IMDB gives it as 1961). It should also not be confused with the later film The Naked Witch (1967) from director Andy Milligan.
Trailer here
Full film available here