This is a strange one. Richard Johnson (whom you might know from Martin Clunes' Doc Martin) is a lover of many women in Rome (a fanny rat, as they say). The thing is, he's getting the feeling that there's this creepy old woman following him around the place. After trying to track her down several times he responds to an ultra specific advert in a magazine looking for a librarian who exactly fits his description - you guessed it -the library is in a creepy old mansion in the middle of Rome and the old lady is seemingly the only inhabitant.The old lady wants him to transcribe all her dead husband's writing and sort the library out and even live in the house. Richard thinks she's full of crap and is halfway out the door when the old lady's daughter Aura makes an appearance, which coincides with Richard reconsidering the job while making eyes at Aura (and she seems up for it!).Aura's up for it only if Richard takes the job, moves in, doesn't mind all the dead cats lying about, ignores the dead husband in the casket and gets rid of the previous transcriber who appears to have gone mad. That sounds like a good idea to Richard, who seems to be thinking with his 'lower brain' as it were.But this is also where things start getting really weird, because Aura also seems to be stringing along the other transcriber, playing mind games with Richard, and Richard's also having to put up with the old lady seemingly spying on him all the time.Is this film sufficiently coffee table? It seems to want to be a horror and an art-house film and some sort of serious battle of the sexes type film, but the only character you can really care about is the other transcriber, Fabrizio, played by Volonte as a very broken man. Richard is too much of a jerk to like, and even gives Aura a good punching at one point. There's rather a lot of blah in this film, but Damiano does through in a lot of strange shots and images too which keeps things from bogging down to much in dialogue. Much stuff involving shadows, darkness, and a very strange interaction between Aura and the old lady too.Don't get me wrong though, it's an okay film, but lacking in the more cerebral aspects, like boobs and gore. This is a long long way from Richard Johnson's late eighties Italian film Ratman, that's for sure!

Not perfect but at times startling and even disturbing, this is a fine 1966 b/w film from the versatile director, Damiano Damiani, who made the very different, A Bullet For The General, the same year and later several crime films, including, How To Kill a Judge. Apparently Bunuel at one point considered making this, based upon the book by Carlos Fuentes, and he would no doubt have made it a little more sinister and a little less hysterical. Anyhow, here we have the lovely Rosanna Schiaffino, who would appear in the colourful and equally strange, Check to the Queen a couple of years later. Here she is the love/sex interest, although like her worrying elderly mistress, also takes a turn at the frighteningly weird when she becomes stressed. You will have never seen anything quite like this, despite the seeming familiar theme of possession, and should definitely check it out.

This one seems to pick up on the Bavaesque idea to stage a psychothriller in a lavish but rundown Roman villa—a terrific set with a labyrinthan Orson Wellesian quality--and includes some chase scenes reminiscent of Bava too. The plot involves Sergio answering a want ad for a scholar to reorganize an old library (as in the Hammer Dracula), by an old women and her here-one-minute-gone-the-next, and extremely beautiful daughter. The main problem is it took me about five minutes to figure out what was going on, then I had to sit through another 90 minutes of Richard Johnson not being able to figure what it all meant. Let's see, a reclusive old woman, rare flowers, magic tea, dead cats, a daughter who only appears now and then, then mimics the gestures of the old woman. And yet he just doesn't get it. It's OK when horror movie characters are a bit dumb, but to be utterly clueless stretches one's patience. This movie also blundered badly by trying to fill up a horror movie framework with psychological thriller soap-opera argumentations ad infinitum and, some of which, involving a male librarian already trapped in the old women's employ, are unwatchably tedious (had to hit the fast forward button a few times). Here and there, some sequences work, like when Johnson has to remove Aura's dress no hands allowed, or a very weird bathing sequence or the final scene, but generally a fatal case of genre confusion. Not watchable except for spelunkers after Italian movie witches (but this one is far downhill from Argento's Suspira and even the fairy tale witches in movies like Lucifera).

Sergio (Richard Johnson) responds to a "Help Wanted" ad for a librarian that seems to have been written just for him. When he arrives at the rambling villa, he meets an old woman who has been following him. At first, he writes her off as a nutty old broad and wants nothing to do with her or her job. But then he meets the old woman's daughter, Aura (Rosanna Schiaffino), and decides the job might have a few more perks than he at first imagined. But is Aura for real and to what lengths will he go to get her.The Witch is a very slow moving, but incredibly intriguing film. The movie takes its time in building the suspense and ultimate horror. And while many of the plot points and twists along the way are surely obvious to most anyone, the fun is watching these plot points and twists unfold. I generally don't put much emphasis on things like this, but the relationship Sergio and Aura is as erotic as I've seen. The passion is all but palatable. And when Aura disappears, it's easy to feel Sergio's pain. The final scenes present a more than satisfying conclusion to the film. Although most viewers will have guessed that the old woman and Aura are really one and the same, the whole notion and the way it's presented in The Witch makes for a nice ending.The acting in The Witch is easily its highpoint. Richard Johnson is outstanding as the love-stricken librarian slowly going insane. As for Rosanna Schiaffino, I don't know where these Italian producers found these incredible women. It's not a stretch of the imagination to believe Schiaffino could force any man to fall for her. Finally, Gian Maria Volonte is tremendous as Aura's former lover. I've only seen Volonte in his crazed, over-the-top roles in Spaghetti Western roles, so it was a nice to see him in a more subdued, yet just as crazed, role.In the end, if you're a fan of Italian horror, The Witch is definitely worth seeking out.