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The Naked Witch
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - VCI Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (23rd May 2025). |
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The Film
 The eighth in a series of murders of young women drained of blood deep in the Louisiana bayou spurns a paranormal investigation expedition lead by Dr. Hayes (Green Acres's Alvy Moore) who brings along psychically sensitive Tania (Up Your Teddy Bear's Thordis Brandt), doting secretary Maggie (The Pleasure Seekers' Shelby Grant), students Owen (Riot on Sunset Strip's Tony Benson) and Sharon (Murph the Surf's Robyn Millan), and skeptical reporter Victor (The Naked Kiss' Anthony Eisley). Ferried to an isolated hunting cabin (by ubiquitous movie and episodic TV old timer Burt Mustin) surrounded by miles of quicksand-laden swampland on all sides, the group is all the more vulnerable to Sabbat master Luther the Berserk (Revenge is My Destiny!'s John Lodge) who is drawn to them by Hayes' experiments utilizing Tania as a psychic compass. Discovering that Tania's grandmother was a witch, the lustful Luther conjures retired Sabbat mistress Jessie (What's the Matter With Helen?'s Helene Winston) to help him induct the unwilling girl as the thirteenth member of his coven, offering to restore her youth in exchange using the blood of Sharon who has been lured into the swamp by Tania in a trance. Learning Luther's intentions through hypnosis, Hayes, Victor, and Owen endeavor to protect Tania and Maggie – whose blood is needed to for Tania's initiation ritual – from the black magic of Luther, a rejuvenated Jessie (transformed into The Undertaker and His Pals' Warrene Ott) and his coven of twelve (among them Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!'s Sue Bernard, Playboy Playmate Nancy Crawford, The Babysitter's Patricia Wymer, and Sinthia: The Devil's Doll's Dianne Webber). Although it looks very much like regional production – particularly a Floridian Bill Grefe production with a more "upscale" cast – The Naked Witch (originally titled "The Witchmaker") was actually lensed largely on Monogram soundstages in Los Angeles with location photography in Louisiana and serves as sort of a dry run for The Brotherhood of Satan which, like this film, was produced by actor L.Q. Jones (The Wild Bunch) and Moore who also brought us the cult classic A Boy and His Dog. While the story drags, the visuals of cinematographer John Morrill (Kingdom of the Spiders) are frequently creative, with foreground Spanish moss framing compositions, sometimes strategically so in the M-rated film's efforts to show nudity without actually showing anything. Genre regular Jaime Mendoza-Nava (Legend of Boggy Creek) provides an underscore that occasionally stretches into the burlesque as the revels of Luther's coven include carousing and belly-dancing. The film's effects are performed in-camera with straight cuts to materialize the coven members (including one's transformation from cat to human) and much wind and lightning flashes to suggest more than is actually occurring. Lodge and Winston give the standout scenery-chewing performances while it is hard to take Moore seriously as anything other than Hank Kimball in the bayou. Bland Eisley, on the other hand, fares a bit better here than as the middle-aged beatnik in Dracula vs. Frankenstein or the victim of The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals. 
Video
Released in 1969 by Excelsior Distributing Company under its original title "The Witchmaker" and reissued in 1974 by Claude Alexander's Alexander Pictures as "The Legend of Witch Hollow" and as The Naked Witch – not to be confused with Alexander's own 1961 "nudie" film co-directed by Larry Buchanan (Mars Needs Women) which Alexander also released on a double bill under its own title with the "Witch Hollow" version – the film was released on tape in Canada by Interglobal (copies of which ended up in American video stores). A widescreen version became available through grey market sources – with the incomplete 35mm source print augmented by videotape inserts – and got its first official American release as "The Witchmaker" on DVD from Code Red in 2011 utilizing a print with "The Legend of Witch Hollow" title. Their subsequent 2017 Blu-ray – a Ronin Flix exclusive long sold out – was able to utilize a print that restored the original title. VCI's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-ray utilizes a different print with the "Claude Alexander presents The Naked Witch" card appearing on a freeze frame of the original title sequence animation just before the original title can appear. It runs thirty second shorter than the Code Red presentation but it too might have some print damage since there is none of the rumored added nudity – this may be a composite of sources since it opens with the M-rating card (which was replaced in 1970 with the GP-rating) and the Excelsior logo or Alexander was so cheap he just replaced the title and nothing else on the internegative – but is otherwise a different source with sometimes less and differing archival damage. White base scratches abound throughout but this is still a colorful experience of a grainy production – the film was shot in Techniscope, a non-anamorphic 2-perf shooting format that allowed twice as much footage to be shot per roll of film before the final cut was then blown-up and optically squeezed to 4-perf for Cinemascope-compatible projection – and producer Jones stated in an interview on the Code Red disc that the darker scenes were deliberately underlit to draw focus to set elements while obscuring what simply was not there. Colors are slightly more saturated with the gray swamps taking on a slight blue hue and Luther looking slightly less gray-white. Framing restores slivers of information to the right and left of the frame and shifts the frame up, losing a margin along the bottom of the frame while Code Red featured more there but shaved a bit off the top of the frame in comparison. VCI's encode looks best in bright scenes while darker scenes evince some subtle smearing and blacks look a bit flat and slightly diluted rather than recessed in the frame. 
Audio
The Code Red Blu-ray had lossless audio while the VCI has lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 mono but the difference may be negligible to most given the optical track source of aged materials. Optional English SDH subtitles are a new addition. 
Extras
The Code Red extras including a commentary by Jones and Morill have not been carried over here. Instead, we get an audio commentary by film historian Robert Kelly which compares poorly to the ones well-researched ones he recorded for VCI's Blu-rays of Las Vegas Hillbillys and Hillbillys in a Haunted House as he apparently did not reference the Jones/Morill track or the Jones interview and instead riffs on what is onscreen and provides background on the cast including Brandt who was apparently a nurse to the stars in between projects. He does observe that the film comes from a period of genre filmmaking where a larger budget would have found someone like Boris Karloff cast in the lead while a lower budget production might have gone farther in the film's exploitation elements. The disc also includes "1960s Horror: A Decade of Innovation and Fear" (4:05) which is a poster gallery of sixties horror films with some bland narration about genre trends in the decade, along with a theatrical trailer (1:13), TV spot (1:00), and radio spot (0:44) all under the title "The Witchmaker". 
Overall
Although VCI's transfer of "The Witchmaker" under the reissue title The Naked Witch offers a slightly more colorful, differently-framed source, it is not so much an upgrade as just different enough that fans of the film may want it to supplement their Code Red edition.
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