Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!
Camp, when it’s good camp, is almost always unintentional. Quality camp is something that happens, not something that is specifically created, although there are certainly some exceptions. The Love Witch, from 2016 is possibly an exception to that basic idea, but it may not be. This is a film that is very much an homage to horror films from the 1970s. There’s a lot of The Stepford Wives lurking here, and a good amount of giallo in the mix. As a part of that, a lot of the acting is very stilted, and I can only think this is intentional. While most of the film looks like it’s taking place in that era (including some antique cars and a lot of retro furniture), everyone seems to have a cell phone, so the confusion is clearly intended.
We’re going to be spending most of the movie in the company of Elaine Parks (Samantha Robinson), a witch who is both remarkably lucky and remarkably unlucky in love. Recently widowed, and the more we see the more she is clearly implicated in the death of her husband, Elaine moves to the town of Aracata, CA, a place that accepts witchcraft. Elaine is going to set up shop, looking for a new man. She meets Trish (Laura Waddell), who is happily married, which causes some jealousy in Elaine, and yes, that’s eventually going to pay off.
Desperate for a new love, Elaine casts a love spell and soon meets Wayne (Jeffrey Vincent Parise), a professor at a local college. Elaine soon worms her way into his mind, and the two are soon having sex. Following this, Wayne becomes completely obsessed with Elaine and soon dies from an apparent heart attack. Elaine performs a weird ritual and buries him, leaving behind a witch bottle filled with urine, a used tampon or two and more.
But Elaine’s not done. She’s going to go through a few more men, including Trish’s husband Richard (Robert Seeley), who will also fall completely under the spell of Elaine to the point where he’s eventually going to kill himself. And then Elaine is going to turn her sights on local police detective Griff Meadows (Gian Keys), the man who is investigating the disappearance of Wayne.
The truth is that there’s not a huge amount of plot to The Love Witch. Elaine wants a man and is in a headspace where she will do anything to get one. This is a world where magic works, and her specialty is sex magic, and so that’s what we’re going to get. We’ll get a lot of rituals that involve a lot of full frontal nudity (men and women—it’s equal opportunity nudity), and we’ll get some very campy acting and line reads that feel just this side of mid-range porn (and to be fair, a couple of the actors appear to have careers based in at least softcore).
The Love Witch is clearly as much comedy as it is horror, but it’s not a laugh-out-loud production. It’s smarter than that. While the characters in the film take what is happening very seriously, the film itself clearly does not, and it somehow works. It would be hard to make a steady diet of this and it has a sort of energy that I don’t think could be easily replicated. It has the feel of a lightning in a bottle production—one that simply worked despite itself and for no reason other than the fact that it simply works.
It's hard not to love it—the terrible art on Elaine’s walls, the garish blood, the goofy witch rituals, and more. Elaine’s eye shadow deserves its own line in the credits.
Perhaps nothing crystalizes exactly what this film is as the scene where Elaine and Griff stumble on people—many of whom are in Elaine’s coven—more or less doing a Renaissance faire in the middle of the forest just for themselves. There’s a guy dressed like a jester, a pantomime horse, and people cavorting on stage for an audience of essentially no one. Why? Who knows? Who the hell cares? It’s weird and gives us an excuse to be around weird people for a couple of minutes. Why the hell not?
I don’t have an explanation for The Love Witch, but it’s hard not to love it at least a little.
Why to watch The Love Witch: It’s an homage to a bygone time.
Why not to watch: You may not be prepared for how campy it is.
I saw this a year or 2 ago. This was damn good fun. I love it for all of its campiness and Technicolor presentation.
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