Cry of the Banshee (1970)

Wow! It opens with Vincent Price's head with drawn in eyeballs jerkily rising over an animated background, exactly like in Monty Python openings. Vincent's head splits open and a bunch of little animated devils fly out. The intro animations are all fantastic! "TITLES: TERRY GILLIAM" it says near the end of the credits, explaining everything. That was a nice surprise.

It opens in a modern courtroom where a bunch of people in 1500s outfits are sentencing a witch, and it's not clear if this is more Monty Pythonery or if they just couldn't afford to decorate the courtroom better. The outside is all deep-discount 1500s set, with guards in dayglo-red uniforms, so I guess it was just a budget issue. The townspeople are less concerned with the witch and more with the "mad dog" that is ripping the heads off of their sheep at night.

A couple more heathens are captured and thrown before the court of King Vincent Price, who demands entertainment. The King's entertainment is disrupted by a wolf's howl, and someone in the court says it's the "cry of a banshee telling us that death is near." King Price makes overwrought hand gestures, stabs the heathen boy to death, and gets stabbed with a fork by the heathen girl. King Price's wife calls him a murder and is banished to her bedroom. They comment on the banshee cries again. There are plenty of harbingers.

The king's wife proclaims that this house is cursed, and the king's family is cursed, and everyone is cursed. And they are cursed… but… later in the movie. Her stepson rapes her, and he gives in willingly after a partial struggle, as was the sexploitation style of the time. There are more gratuitous scenes of molestation and assault scattered throughout. It's supposed to be a Church vs Pagans story, but they're just so awful at telling it and keep getting distracted by women's breasts. Every scene is kind of the same.

King Price, who is really Magistrate Price, tells his sons that the ways of witchery still plague the countryside. His daughter is sleeping in the hay with a farmboy, who catches a fuzzy bunny rabbit by hand. The daughter wants to eat him, and her fiancé says the bunny is his friend. This movie is all over the place, and we still haven't had a single bewitching.

The "mad dog", which is just a normal grey dog, appears in the village. It tries to eat a little girl. The princess's fiancé, who we learn was "found in the woods," hypnotizes with a magic pendant on his necklace. He can't explain what it is or where it came from, only that it lets him control animals.

When King Price kills a bunch of heathens, their leader curses the family, and magically summons the princess's fiancé. Though they aren't really heathens, since they're praying to Satan. They're actually Satanists.

It's like watching the same scene over and over again. They cover the same topics and don't make any progress. They could have been slapped together in basically any order, since they're all the same, and I wouldn't be surprised if several of them were reordered.

One of the princes gets got by a doggy. They get the doggy and parade its head around on a spike at a banquet with some nice lute music. All is going fine until King Price's wife sees the dog head, and curses them all again. I think the house is triple-cursed at this point. Not that all of their yammering about witches and banshees and curses is coming to anything.

Finally, the curse hits. The head priestess remote controls the princess's fiancé, turning him into a wolf-man. She uses him to kill King Price's loved ones, one-by-one, which takes way too long. It's maybe 15 minutes worth of movie stretched to 90 minutes, and the only redeeming factor was Vincent Price's voice.