Witchfinder General [Blu-ray]

My Pivotal Film Experience.
Every lover of film has had a pivotal film experience, the movie that made such an impact on them that they have never forgotten it. For me WITCHFINDER GENERAL is that film. I first saw it in 1969 as THE CONQUERER WORM (AIP's American release title designed to cash in on the Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe series although the movie has nothing to do with Poe). I was 17 years old, just about to complete my junior year of high school in Greenville SC, and was a big fan of the Roger Corman/Vincent Price Poe series. I had seen very few films that would not qualify as G rated. The ratings system had just been introduced the year before and this film was rated M (for mature audiences, later GP then PG). It was a complete shock to the system in every way. It was the first time I had seen nudity/lovemaking before and the violence was painful and ugly. Vincent Price was cold and hard without a trace of his usual mannerisms and therefore not sympathetic in the least. To top it all off there was...

A satisfying but sadly marginalised cult horror classic
The Conqueror Worm is a textbook example of a movie's potential prospects as an acknowledged classic being wrecked by the stupidity of critics and the cynical manipulations of a distributor underestimating the intelligence of American viewers. Distributed by AIP in America as "The Conqueror Worm" and purportedly "based on the writing of Edgar Allan Poe", the film got buried by disinterested US critics who incorrectly passed it off as simply another addition to the increasingly tiresome Poe fare being churned out by AIP, Roger Corman and others. The casting of Vincent Price, of course, only strengthened this unfortunate and lazy critical impulse. For this, the distributor is as much to blame as the critics, by consciously pursuing a marketing strategy which implied precisely what critics chose to believe. And by tampering with the film itself to contrive to provide a Poe connection (by adding prologue and epilogue commentary by Vincent Price quoting...

The original is better
"The Conqueror Worm" is the American title of "Witchfinder General," which was sold -- deceitfully -- by American International as part of the Edgar Allan Poe cycle (a dubbed-in recitation of Poe's poem "The Conqueror Worm" by Vincent Price is its only connection). While "Conqueror Worm" contains all of the picture elements of the available British version (though the version released to theatres in 1968 was even more graphic in the torture scenes), the superlative music score by Paul Ferris did not make the transition and was replaced by an initially pleasing, but quickly repetitive and inadequate synthesizer theme (in some scenes the music simply runs out, then starts over again like its on a loop). Even so, this grim historical thriller features one of Vincent Price's all time best performances as Matthew Hopkins, a powerful man with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Price was not so much directed by Michael Reeves as goaded by him (Reeves really wanted Donald Pleasence for the...

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