The Witches (aka The Devil's Own)
DVD Anchor Bay Entertainment
1966, 91 minutes

review by Lee Peterson

The first of three films Hammer Studios would produce dealing with the subject of black magic (1968's The Devil Rides Out  and 1973's To the Devil...a Daughter  were to follow), The Witches is a rather lackluster effort, hampered by an uncharacteristically bland script by the Quatermass series' author Nigel Kneale (adapted from Peter Curtis' novel The Devil's Own ). 

After witnessing a voodoo-fueled "tribal rebellion" while teaching in an African jungle, schoolteacher Gwen Mayfield (Joan Fontaine, star of Hitchcock's Rebecca and Suspicion ) suffers a nervous breakdown. Upon her release from a mental hospital, she takes a job as headmistress at a private school located in the quaintly secluded English village of Heddaby. Escorted by Alan Bax (Frenzy' s Alec McCowen), a failed clergyman (who can't quite bring himself to give up the collar), Gwen finds it odd that the village is entirely without a place of worship.

Immediately upon settling in to her new job, Gwen begins to notice the odd behavior of her students, especially shy Ronnie (Village of the Damned' s Martin Stephens) and his girlfriend Linda (Ingrid Brett). Everyone in the village appears to be trying to keep the young lovebirds apart , including Linda's granny, who, after catching the teenagers together after dark, puts Linda's hand through a clothes wringer (!). Shortly after Ronnie alerts Ms. Mayfield to the sinister goings-on, he mysteriously falls into a coma. When Gwen finds a decapitated, pin-riddled voodoo doll on the school grounds, she begins to think that there just might be something to the boy's stories after all.

Assisted by Alan's newspaper-reporter sister Stephanie (A Study in Terror' s Kay Walsh), Gwen begins to investigate, eventually coming to the conclusion that Linda is ordained to be used as a virginal sacrifice during a black mass (!). 

After the great pre-credits sequence in which Gwen is attacked by a witch-doctor wearing a huge, grinning wooden voodoo mask (that looks unsettlingly like the talking trees from H.R. Pufnstuf ), The Witches settles into a fairly dull, slow-moving mystery that is finally revived by the hilariously misguided "black mass" ritual that looks like a really, really chintzy Elks Lodge version of a Jerome Kern interpretive dance number. Without a doubt, it is the funniest black magic ritual ever committed to celluloid.

Anchor Bay Entertainment's widescreen (1.66:1, 16X9 enhanced) DVD presentation of The Witches is absolutely stunning. The transfer is razor-sharp, with an enormous amount of detail, and the colors are all stable and bright . The effective, understated score by Richard Rodney Bennett (The Man Who Could Cheat Death and Hammer's The Nanny ) is served well by the booming Dolby Digital Mono soundtrack. 

As is the norm with Anchor Bay's Hammer releases, bonus features include a UK theatrical trailer (bearing the film's original title of The Devil's Own ), two U.S. TV spots (one a double feature, paired with Prehistoric Women ), and a half-hour, Oliver Reed-narrated "World of Hammer" episode, entitled "Wicked Women".
 

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