A new feature about movies that we don't have the will to pull the plug on but are so dreadful, silly or boring that we grab the remote and start zipping through scenes just to get it over with:
THE LOVE WITCH (D) - What were thinking? What were they going for? What made me watch it?
This faithful homage to trashy '60s and '70s Technicolor horror movies scores points for its attention to detail. But writer-director (and designer) Anna Biller, who trod the retro sexploitation territory nearly a decade ago with a movie called "Viva," makes a vital mistake. She forgets how bad those movies that she's replicating were.
But this is more of an art installation than a film, so maybe I'm not qualified to criticize it. The color red pops all over the screen, as do the usual-suspect primary colors in supporting roles. But "The Love Witch" conjures up a bizarre alternative universe where Jean-Luc Godard directed episodes of "Love, American Style" with his muse, Connie Stevens.
When I was pretty little, one of the first horror movies I recalled seeing on TV was "Two on a Guillotine," which starred the perpetually lip-glossed Miss Stevens along with miscast Disney refugee Dean Jones and Cesar Romero (scary to a child even without his Joker makeup) in an embarrassing haunted-house romp. I was too young to know enough to roll my eyes, and I was wide-eyed and willing to play along with the genre. (Unlike my sister, whose nerves couldn't even handle "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.")
I rarely can tolerate horror films and their tired tropes. I was of an impressionable age for the original "Halloween" (and for Jamie Curtis), and as an adult I was completely jangled by the original "Blair Witch Project," even though I knew it was a fake-out and was watching it at home on VHS. But in general, those chiller-theater features don't work on me. So, for all I know, "The Love Witch" -- about a sexy brunette who concocts potions and casts spells with unfailingly fatal results -- has subverted the genre brilliantly. Maybe this is a deep feminist statement.
But .... there's homage and there's inspiration, and then there is tedious note-for-note copy-catting. Biller fusses over every inch of every frame (albeit with low-rent production values), which perhaps explains why she makes one of these only every decade or so. But paying homage to "Dark Shadows" by way of the TV version of "Batman" plus a dash of "Dragnet" -- complete with corny dialogue and wooden characters -- is just plain flat and goofy.
Samantha Robinson stars as Elaine, whose name makes her sound more like a neighbor on "Bewitched" than a femme fatale. Robinson is conventionally pretty -- an alluring mix of Diana Rigg and Alison Brie. But she certainly can't act. It's as if she is parodying Megan's clunky acting in a soap opera on TV's "Mad Men." She has a friend with a British accent (for some reason), eventually seducing the friend's husband and driving him to suicide. Quelle fun!
Rolling my eyes frequently, I chose not to shut it off, because I was curious about how it would play out. But I'm sure I missed nothing crucial by fast-forward through healthy chunks of the movie. Robinson is lovely to look at. (The no-frontal-nudity clause in her contract is obvious by the way her long hair always strategically drapes over her breasts.) By the time Elaine and a square-jawed police detective wed amid prancing renaissance-faire extras, "The Love Witch" has gone completely off the rails. Biller just has no ear for camp.
My curiosity satisfied, I got through this two-hour feature in a little over an hour. In retrospect, 3x speed might have been better.
BONUS TRACK
Don't be fooled by the trailer:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment