I love this movie so much

I gave this film a 9 out of 10, because it was exactly what I expected it to be.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

This is yet another film where you should probably watch it without the aid of booze or sleeping pills or whatever as barely anything happens at all for its entire running time. That said, it's not a total failure, but it's not that good either.After a fairly interesting start where a woman finds her cat stabbed to death by a young girl, then sets that young girl on fire, said woman goes to lay it on Fatal Attraction style with her ex, photographer Mario (and that is one THICK moustache that man has on him). Mario's not taking her insane advances too well, so he cancels his vacation and takes an assignment to go to Witches Mountain to take pictures of stuff.So far, so early seventies European horror. Mario heads off and somehow hooks up with a woman he was taking topless picture of on the fly. The two of them head off to Witches Mountain and the film kind of grinds to a halt.Uneventful, or atmospheric? Brooding or boring? That's up to you. Me, I had a hard time keeping my eyes open as these two wandered around the brooding, atmospheric Spanish landscape in a uneventful, boring way. There are touches here and there that saves the film from being a total flatliner (like the guy taking creepy pictures, the start of the film, others) but this isn't the best Euro-horror I've watched. At all.

There may be a more coherent version of this Spanish-made "spooker," but the version that circulated on VHS and TV in the 1970s is a mess. A photojournalist befriends a writer, and rather than drive down to Madrid and have a nice, safe, pleasant romance they hike into Witch's Mountain where the writer eventually joins with the witches and / or becomes a witch. The ending in keeping with the whole movie is unclear. Director Artigot proves his inability of telling a story by staging important dialogs and possible emotional states of the characters in long shot, and saving his closeups for lovingly composed visions of Miss Shepard's face. As the writer cum victim, Shepard isn't given much to do but her presence is the only thing worthwhile in this stinker.

I couldn't make sense of this film much of the time, and neither could anyone else, based on other reviews. The opening scene of this film has virtually nothing to do with the rest of the story. In it, a photojournalist with a big mustache cancels his vacation to get away from his girlfriend. He is assigned to photograph a mountain range. It's rumored to be haunted, but I couldn't tell whether he heard that from his boss or later in the film. On his way, he meets a beautiful writer (Patty Shepard) and convinces her to join him on his working trip. Throughout the film, there is this terrible music score, mostly consisting of noisy chanting that makes you want to scream "SHUT UP ALREADY!!!" What really will gall a person is that the film always seems like it's about to become good, though it never does. There is beautiful mountain scenery and some genuinely creepy atmosphere. The inn and the silent, abandoned old buildings scattered on the mountain are rather ominous. The foggy nights look real, not like someone put an artificial fog machine on the set. And the idea, while not original, had potential. But it never does improve, at least not enough to be worthwhile. Here's how it goes, more or less. They stop at this inn run by a weird innkeeper (you expect him to be named Igor) with a hearing problem. There is a scene where the writer thinks a peeping tom is in her window, but the scene is so dark, I had no idea what was going on. Whether this was poor lighting or a poor film transfer is unknown to me. In any event, we never find out know what happened. There is a scene where she wanders off during the night. Whether she is sleepwalking or mesmerized by the witches of the title is never explained. Another scene which is never explained is when their car is stolen, then found again, with nothing stolen. They wind up in this apparently abandoned mountain village whose sole inhabitant is this seemingly kindly old woman. There are other things, including a chained wild man in a cave who is never explained, an attempt to sacrifice the writer in some way (will they kill her or brainwash her into joining them?), the witches themselves, a bunch of brunette women in white robes who don't show up until the last 15 minutes of the film and whose practices and beliefs are never explained. Even the closing scene doesn't make any sense. When all is said and done, most people will be saying, "Huh?"

This engaging (which it shouldn't be) low-grade Spanish exploitation (quite tame I might add) looks good, but huh? Let me phrase that again 'huh?'. Actually the word 'huh?' would be going through your mind quite a lot. Nothing makes sense, nor does it try too. I just don't know if its complicatedly cryptic or just a convoluted muddle, but there's no denying how laconically uneventful, strange and wordy it feels.Unrelated sequences tied (like that nasty opening involving a little girl, dead cat and fire) in to a sparse story involving photographer Mario (played by a chest-puffing John Caffari, who's mustache is a dead ringer for Nintendo's iconic Mario. What's the odds?) that ditches his girlfriend at home and encounters a young lady (a gorgeously fixating Patty Shepard) who he asks to come with him on an photography assignment, where at this remote mountain retreat they come across some hooded witches.Look past the unhinged plot structure and wallow in what is simply a moody piece of atmospheric mechanisms and growing unease. Raul Artigot directs few jarringly unusual visuals and creepy passages, but for most part seems sporadically non-existent and unfocused just like his writing. Ramon Sempere's striking cinematography lenses the gracefully rich scenery as we take in the scenic views and let the time leisurely grind away. However there are certain areas where it was too dark to see what was going on. Fernando Garcia Morcillo's hauntingly bombastic and overwrought score blends terrifically with compulsively dense atmosphere created. The leads are capable, but there's also a sturdy bunch (the pick being Víctor Israel) of secondary performances.Slow with little in the way of interest, but this dreamy set-up (that seems to go on and on) manages to keep you watching until its closing.