Butler's Cinema Scene

Samantha Robinson as “The Love Witch”

“THE LOVE WITCH” My rating: C+

120 minutes | No MPAA rating

Solidly ensconced in the so-bad-it’s-almost-good end of the movie spectrum, “The Love Witch” is a spoof of late ’70s exploitation cinema shot through with feminist philosophy.

Anna Biller’s film parodies cheap horror movies and cheap sex flicks. It features acting that is either very bad or spectacularly good at approximating bad acting.

At the same time, it has been painstakingly designed.  You can see that  from the first scene when the “love witch” of the title, Elaine (Samantha Robinson), pulls into a new town in a Mustang convertible whose paint job is perfectly matched by her lipstick, crimson dress and blood-red luggage.

Elaine is a whack job who uses black magic to find true love…although her efforts have been less than fruitful to date.  She murdered her husband with a homemade potion (she steeps her used tampons in urine). Now she’s come to a picturesque college town for a fresh beginning.

Of course things go south. She kills a  professor (Jeffrey Vincent Parise) with whom she shares a night of passion and bizarre brews, then goes after the straight-arrow and sexually under-satisfied husband (Robert Seeley) of one of her new friends. Post-Elaine, the poor schlub is a weeping, suicidal mess.

Even the homicide detective (Gian Keys) who comes snooping around isn’t immune to Elaine’s charms.

Men don’t do well in this world. Guys, according to Elaine’s philosophy, are “fragile and can be crushed if a woman asserts herself in any way.”

So she does everything she can to please her victims, to play to their childlike egos and fulfill their sexual fantasies.

There’s some wonderfully dopey stuff going on here, like a girls’ night out at a burlesque club, a tea house where the patrons and employees all show up in Victorian-era dress, and an erotically-charged Renaissance fair that is a cover for a coven of witches.

Not great, but a diverting goof.

| Robert W. Butler