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Plot

The inimitable Vincent Price puts an interesting spin on this otherwise pedestrian witch-hunt exercise -- a rehashing of Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm) and several of Roger Corman's numerous Poe variations from the previous decade. Here Price plays Edward Whitman, a corrupt, sadistic magistrate in 16th-century Ireland who puts a quick and deadly stop to the activities of a local Druidic coven... but not before the sect's leader Oona (Elisabeth Bergner) puts a curse on him and the Whitman family line, calling up a vengeful spirit known as a "sidhee" which takes flesh in the form of an otherwise mild-mannered stable boy (Patrick Mower). As swift and violent retribution works its way through the Whitman family, so does this film snowball toward its bizarre and muddled conclusion -- made all the more confounding by rather choppy editing. Just like Conqueror Worm and half a dozen others, this was fallaciously marketed by distributor American International Pictures as yet another adaptation of the works of Edgar Allan Poe -- as if AIP hadn't kicked Poe's corpse around enough in the '60s.
MPAA Rating:
Genre(s):
Horror,Thriller
Run Time:
87min.
Director(s):
Gordon Hessler
Starring:
Vincent Price , Elisabeth Bergner , Essy Persson , Hugh Griffith , Patrick Mower
Themes:
Religious Zealotry,Witches
Tone:
Creepy,Disturbing,Goth
Keywords:
coven,curse,execution,family,heretic,magistrate,massacre,murder,persecution,revenge,supernatural-forces,werewolf,witch,witchcraft,witchhunt [persecution]