The Love Witch is a Groovy, Stunningly Realized Tribute to the Camp and Kitsch of Late 1960s Horror
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
For a very long time a big part of my job as a professional pop culture writer involved staying on top of things. At The A.V. Club and The Dissolve I would help write movie previews that served multiple purposes. These guides let readers and writers know what was coming out and what they should be excited about.
For a number of years I’d also go to Sundance every January and see all of the big arthouse films people would be talking about or politely ignoring in the year ahead.
Then I got laid off from The Dissolve in 2015 and I stopped being on top of things. I stopped paying attention to upcoming films. I no longer attend Sundance. I stopped being a film critic and became a deeply idiosyncratic pop culture writer who writes about whatever the hell he wants to write about, no matter how obscure or random or unpopular, as well as the films you pay me to write about for this column.
In a sense I am out-sourcing to you, my beloved readers/patrons, the all-important job of finding weird, worthy movies to cover. It’s worked out great so far!
The income from this column has played a huge role in allowing me to make a good thirty to forty percent of what I need to just barely get by. More importantly you’ve introduced me to a bunch of groovy movies I sincerely dig and never would have covered if it were not my professional obligation to do so.
I’m talking about movies like 2016’s The Love Witch. It’s the kind of cinephile-friendly pop culture treasure I might have discovered as a midnight movie at Sundance once upon a time but that I watch on my television these days.
The Love Witch is a glorious pastiche meticulously designed to look and feel EXACTLY not just like a movie from the late 1960s but a particular day and week. The Love Witch is SO specific and so obsessive that it feels like it was created to feel like something you might see on November 14th, 1968 and only on that particular day.
Anna Biller didn’t just write, direct and produce the film. She’s also credited with the sets, costumes, editing and music. The Love Witch consequently reflects her vision to an unusually pure degree. It’s homemade in the best possible sense, a pastiche that cares enough to get the details exactly right.
In a fearless and fabulous star-making performance, Samantha Robinson plays Elaine Parks, a beautiful, radiant young witch fleeing a series of bad relationships and dodgy situations.
She’s been unlucky in love over and over again yet that has not affected her fierce conviction that life is nothing without love and that love may or may not be worth dying for but it is DEFINITELY worth killing for.
Samantha’s new apartment is a museum of exquisite bad taste, a riot of aggressively non-tasteful nudes, pastels and late 1960s kitsch. No detail is too small for Biller’s exacting eye. In an early scene, for example, the anti-heroine coordinates her luggage, car and ensemble so that they’re all the same bold shade of cherry red.
The titular witch performs some spells and attracts Wayne Peters, a hunky, bearded professor with bedroom eyes and a cabin in the country where he takes women for X-rated extracurricular activities.
With a little help from the goddesses, Wayne falls fast and hard for his witchy new associate but Elaine loses interest in him as a partner when he turns out to be like every man in the film: toxic, inadequate and doomed.
In the courtship stage, Elaine is a Marabel Morgan acolyte convinced that the key to landing and keeping a man entails transforming yourself into his fantasy dream girl. It’s all love bombing and sex spells and girlish adoration infatuation.
But when Elaine’s dream hunks turn out to be nightmare man-babies she transforms into a Wiccan feminist avenger with an agenda, a body count and no qualms about using her lush, exotic sexuality to achieve her ends.
When Wayne meets an untimely, unfortunate and inevitable end Elaine next sets her sights on Richard (Robert Seeley), the handsome husband of her friend Trish (Laura Waddell), the interior decorator responsible for the exquisite vulgarity of Elaine’s apartment.
History repeats itself when Richard follows a familiar arc from flirtation to infatuation and then pathetic, destructive obsession when the unfaithful hubby becomes so fixated on Elaine that he falls into a deep depression and kills himself.
The next eminently deserving victim on Elaine’s list is Griff Meadows (Gian Keys), a detective investigating Wayne’s disappearance who looks like a caricature of a macho hunk. In other words, he looks like a Russ Meyer stud. That’s appropriate, since The Love Witch has a major Valley of the Dolls/Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
Griff foolishly imagines that he’s different and tougher than all of the others but he ends up yet another helpless hopeless man ensnared in our heroine/anti-heroine and villain’s spider web.
Biller has created a time-warped instant cult artifact that’s deliberately stiff, awkward, stilted and over the top. The acting is redolent of the kind found in the hardcore pornography of the Age of Aquarius, which is to say that it’s barely acting at all.
Does The Love Witch need to be two hours long? Probably not! But Biller has created a world worth getting lost in here, a kitsch paradise worth spending time in.
Biller has an audacious vision that she and her gifted collaborators realize down to a molecular level. I can’t wait to see what she does next so I REALLY hope someone chooses it for this column.
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