Season of the Witch (1973)

'Season of the Witch' aka 'Jack's Wife' aka 'Hungry Wives' is a satirical domestic drama that introduces some supernatural natural ideas early on but doesn't come to be dominated by them till the last third or so. The third feature from 'Night of the Living Dead' director George A. Romero (he made a romantic comedy between this and that film which I have now added to my Amazon watchlist), it's uneven but intriguing, what some might call 'an interesting failure.'

Filmed in and around Romero's home base of Pittsburg with a mostly local cast and crew, the stand out performance is easily that of the films star Jan White, playing Joan Mitchell a 40ish house wife with a husband often away on business and a 19 year old daughter living at home but going to a local collage. Joan is dissatisfied with her life, which is communicated in large part through dream sequences that are some of the best moments of the film, including one in which her husband takes her to a kennel for when he's away on business. On a lark, and though nervous about it as she is a devote Catholic, Joan accompanies a friend to a tarot card reading, where she is introduced to the idea of 'practical witchcraft', which she puts of perusing until her domestic life is complicated when her daughter runs away after having been caught in an affair with one of her professors, played by Raymond Laine the films other most memorable performance.

While the final product comes across as not fully realized with a good share of flat moments, there are parts that are quite good if understandably melodramatic, and there is something kind of haunting about the lead actress. More an abstract then overt horror movie I went in expecting that it wouldn't be able to keep my attention, but it did sufficiently for me to be able to sit through the 89 minute cut I saw, though the apparently lost original cut was over 2 hours and a 1 hour 45 minute cut is apparently also available, and might even be worth hunting down. Definitely not for everyone but for me **1/2.