You always know what to expect from this genre of low-budget supernatural-historical movies … peasants with one brain between the lot of them, fine wenches being treated very, very badly, and plenty of over-acting from men wearing tights and funny hats.
Cry of the Banshee has all of these elements, and is fairly representative of the genre. It isn’t on the same level as cult movies like “Witchfinder General” (also starring Vincent Price), but it does have it’s moments. Here Vincent Price plays a wicked lord with a very strange family. He takes great pleasure in finding, mistreating and executing young witches, until he messes with the wrong coven and his entire family is cursed. They soon begin to get gruesomely killed off one by one by a seemingly unstoppable monster. That’ll teach ’em.
Vincent Price gives a fairly memorable performance here as the evil, sadistic lord of the town. He does the best he can with the script, anyway, which is all a great actor can ever do. Nobody else on the cast is particularly noteworthy, but on the whole it’s a fairly competent movie as far as the acting is concerned. On the subject of the script, it does seem to be thing that everyone involved struggled with. The movie had already been sold to the distributors, which meant that the director, re-writers and so on couldn’t change it as much as they would probably have liked to, so they didn’t necessary end up making the movie they wanted to make.
This accounts for the way that some aspects of the film are so much better than others. In some scenes the actors themselves seem pretty bored with it, whereas in others the relish in the opportunity to show their full talent. The scenes involving the witches coven are pretty interesting, and some of the climatic moments are particularly well-shot. Also, the opening credits sequence is instantly recognisable as the work of Monty Python’s artist Terry Gilliam, which is pretty neat. However, there aren’t enough great moments to elevate it above most other movies of it’s kind.
If you’re a fan of Vincent Price, or of those trashy period movies of the sixties and seventies, you might want to give this one a look. Otherwise, it probably won’t appeal to you that much.
