Witchfinder General
Director: Michael Reeves
Year Released: 1968
Rating: 1.5
Very weak Poe adaptation based loosely on the life of real-life English 'witch hunter' Matthew Hopkins (a dour Vincent Price) who stalks the countryside eager to (a.) kill supposed heretics and (b.) abuse young women. It's like an incredibly dumb version of Arthur Miller's The Crucible with aspirations to be a Hammer studios picture, complete with misogynistic overtones, excessive screaming and buckets of red paint. Price, however, is always a treat (even though his filmography is filled with lousy pictures) and it's only fitting that the same night I saw this I watched, for the first time, Tim Burton's animated short Vincent about a relatively normal boy who dreams of being Vincent Price. How can you not see movies like this and think, "Now that guy had one hell of a great day job."
