A young couple traveling through the Pyrenees stays overnight at an ancient Spanish castle, only to discover that it is the headquarters for a coven of witches.
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Welcome to movie 17 on the chilling classics 50 pack. Where we'll see, That's right. Another movie that makes absolutely no sense. Seriously, this movie had me so confused at the end, i thought i was rewatching "At Dawn they Sleep." The plot seems simple enough....well that is until 3 seconds into the movie where a girl supposedly killed a cat and then...um.. explodes? i have no idea what happened. and that was BEFORE THE TITLE SCREEN. That's really sad when i can't even tell what happened in the first 3 minutes.Anyway it stars a photographer with a big mustache who finds this girl after dumping his other girlfriend on the way to take pictures of something somewhere. so we get there but not before somebody steals their jeep to drive it 200 feet out of the way towards a town. suspicious? nah. so they decide to stay at this deserted village with one old lady. and then blah blah stuff happens and blah blah talking. The guy with the mustache goes out in the fog for some reason even though the old lady tells him not to. He gets lost and then finds his way back.Oh, i forgot to mention this is all after an incredibly pointless 20 minutes of them staying in the house of a guy who looks like that buggy eyed guy from casablanca. Then they leave. There's really no point to this scene. It's really just padding. if you cut it out no one would have noticed or cared.But sadly, that was actually the best part of the movie. wait. let me rephrase that. REALLY sadly that was the best part of the movie. because the rest is so confusing that i had to look on IMDb to find out what happened. But of course no one else knows so i'm SOL. Seriously, the last 30 minutes of the movie were some of the most mindscrewing moments i've ever seen on film. They dressed her up in a dress, he gets kidnapped, then released, he runs back to the house, then at the end the witches are in the house and it ends? seriously. i have hardly ever been so confused in a movie. i mean, as bad as movies such as "War of the Robots" are, at least they MAKE SENSE. this movie doesn't even make the ATTEMPT to be coherent. the ending was as confusing as the end of "At dawn they sleep" and the plot was much more boring. This movie gets a 1 just for its sheer "i have no idea what happened in this movie"ness. "Witches mountain" gets 1 confused movie watcher out of 10.
The strikingly comely Patty Shepard portrays a lovely sprite writer who along with jerky hairball photographer John Caffari discovers an evil coven of wicked witches living on a remote mountainside. Naturally, said coven have designs on making poor imperiled Patty their next sacrificial victim. Writer/director Raul Artigot (a cinematographer who shot "The Demons" for Jess Franco) trots out all the standard endearingly hokey scare tactics: an annoying little girl gets torched in the shocking pre-credits epilogue, shrieking black mass incantations on the soundtrack, bothersome black cats that turn into people, unsung character actor Victor Israel (the whistling train baggage handler in "Horror Express") as a creepy near deaf innkeeper, dense, all-encompassing fog, even mysterious sinister hooded figures roaming the misty woods at night! Ramon Sempere's exquisitely expansive photography and the ripely verdant countryside scenery give this likably clumsy outing an eye-filling picturesque look. Nice quintessentially 70's downbeat ending, too. Overall, this picture sizes up as a pleasingly atmospheric, if rather talky and leisurely paced fright flick programmer.
Okay, what the hell kind of TRASH have I been watching now? "The Witches' Mountain" has got to be one of the most incoherent and insane Spanish exploitation flicks ever and yet, at the same time, it's also strangely compelling. There's absolutely nothing that makes sense here and I even doubt there ever was a script to work with, but somehow I couldn't turn it off. The scratching your head with confusion starts right away, with an opening sequence about an angry little girl that killed her mother's cat. So you think this film revolves on children possessed by evil forces? Heck no, because after this intro, the girl and her wickedness simply aren't mentioned anymore. Then cut to a guy, with the most impressively trimmed mustache you'll ever see, who breaks up with his girlfriend in a rather unsubtle way. When she asks him to spend his vacation with her, he promptly phones his employer requesting him any type of assignment! Great move. The movie finally starts now, as he travels to an isolated mountain area to photograph some peaks. Though not before he picks up a new girl (Patty Shepard) and photographs her topless! Throughout their journey, all kind of strange events occur that you guessed it are never explained. The girl wakes up in the middle of the forest, loud petrifying music plays everywhere and someone even steals the jeep! Really, car jacking witches? Apparently a coven of silent witches owns the mountains and they practice voodoo on trespassers. That's as close as I get describing the plot, but there's a good chance I'm way off More important here is the atmosphere! "The Witches' Mountain" is occasionally very creepy, with its spooky music and interesting cinematography. The supportive characters all look uncanny and the ravishing Patty Shepard plays a good heroine. This is the type of European horror film that could have been legendary, if only someone had bothered to write a structured screenplay.
Highly implausible, unbelievable, and incoherent Spanish production about...well, let me see just how close I can get to it. The film opens with a woman having one of her cat's killed by a young girl. She then begs her lover to take her somewhere on his vacation. He calls work and demands that he loses his vacation time and she says he will pay for this. What relevance this plays out to is anybody's guess at the film's end, because the guy, a swarthy photographer, spies a beautiful Patty Shepard, queen of Spanish horror films it seems, taking her bikini top off momentarily so he can snap a picture, ask her out to lunch, and then to his assignment to Witches Mountain - for reasons again we are never privy to. Before they go, Patty must stop by the house and loud, "eerie" chanting echoes in our hero's ears. Again, this is never explained. The film goes on with these two stopping at an inn, going on to the mountain, and finally realizing why the mountain is called Witches Mountain. You know, there are several aspects to this film which make it better than a bad film. It has some atmosphere, some of the character actors are really quite good(especially the deaf innkeeper and the old woman), the leads are at least adequate, and the climax - though it makes absolutely no sense at all - is well-choreographed(literally) with the witches in white brassieres and long black hair. It just doesn't make any sense though, and that is a huge detractor to me. I could watch the film another ten times and still not know more now than I did after the first viewing. That is a major problem. The Witches Mountain is a curious film from the long line of cheap, atmospheric European horror films that blanketed that decade. If you can get more out of it than me, better power to you.