Witchhammer (1970)

[The Great Owl]

During the late 17th century, a minor church communion incident, where an elderly woman hides a wafer in her handkerchief instead of eating it, leads local authorities to summon an inquisitor to their Moravian village to investigate accusations of witchcraft. By using brutal methods specified in the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), a book that outlines the proper extermination procedures for witches, this inquisitor coerces a series of confessions from different poverty-stricken village women that leads to the arrests of more prominent and wealthy citizens, which is quite convenient, since the inquisitor draws his pay from the possessions left over by those accused who are burned at the stake. A kind-hearted local priest attempts in vain to protest the torture and executions of innocent people, but he is soon struggling to prove his own innocence and fighting for his own life when the inquisitions force the prisoners to mention him in their testimonies.

Witchhammer, an intensely bleak 1970 Czechoslovak film, uses the premise of the witchcraft inquisitions to symbolize the corrupt trials in Communist countries. As such, it goes hand-in-hand with other witch hunt films from the era that used these stories as thinly-veiled condemnations of McCarthyism and such. There are some disturbing sequences in the movie, but it never veers into exploitation territory like many of the works in this genre did. In fact, for the most part, it's a beautiful black-and-white movie that benefits from the use of CinemaScope.

My favorite movie of this sort is still Witchfinder General (1968), which stars Vincent Price, but the incredible cinematography of Witchhammer solidly places it in the same realm.

This Second Run Blu-ray sports an impressively filmic transfer that, despite minor print damage, stands as a great presentation of a black-and-white CinemaScope feature. The original Czech dialogue comes across crystal clear, as does the chanting soundtrack and score. The English subtitles bring this movie to us on U.S. shores without being obtrusive.

The supplementary features include a marvelous 22-minute documentary that compares Witchhammer to other such works (Witchfinder General, Mark of the Devil, etc.), and a short film by director Otakar Vávra.

[Drake2222]

Just saw this on blu, excellent film. One of the trial / torture scenes reminded me of 1984