After four local girls are found, murdered, hung up downside down in tree, and drained of blood in a Louisians swamp , an intrepid documentary team comes to investigate. They're actually a lot more intrepid than intelligent though because they decide to stay in an isolated cabin in the middle of the swamp with their only way in or out being a local yokel in a boat who promises to come back and get them in a week, but is incommunicado in the meantime. One of the female members of the team is a "sensitive" who is attuned to witches and who had a grandmother who was an actual witch. The perpetrators turn out to be a female witch, Jessie, and a male "berserker", Lucas, who maintain their youth by drinking human blood. They make short work of most of the team, but take special interest in the "sensitive" who they hope to add to their coven.
This has elements of a lot of future movies--not only "The Blair Witch Project", but also "The Legend of Hell House" as well as other Louisiana-filmed regional obscurities like "The Crypt of Dark Secrets". On the other hand, however, this film is really quite unique in a lot of ways and there never has really been another film like it. It kind of invents its own mythology what with the "berserker", the witches who stay young by drinking blood(which sounds more like vampires), and odd facts like garlic making one invisible to witches and pig's blood being very bad for black masses. The film is also strange in that it in many ways seems like a 50's film, but then it also contains some surprisingly graphic violence and not-so-graphic sex and nudity, and it has the kind of nihilistic ending much more common in 70's films. The most weird and memorable aspect though comes at the end when the villains hold a coven meeting/black sabbath and their coven turns out to include any number of witches, real and fictional, from throughout history, including "Goody Hale" (one of the few Salem residents NOT accused of witchcraft).
The cast is mostly unknowns. The male lead was in "Green Acres", I guess. Two of the coven members are Patricia Wymer (as the "Hag of Devon") and Sue Bernard (as "Felicity Johnson"). Wymer played the titular (and ass-ular) character in "The Babysitter" and also appeared in "The Young Graduates". Bernard, a former Playboy Playmate, had been the bikini-clad girl in Russ Meyers "Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill" and appeared in a number of 70's horror/exploitation films such as Bert Gordon's "The Witching" (also somewhat similar to this) and Curtis Harrington's "The Killing Kind". The pair have all of about two lines between them here, but this isn't really a film that depends much on actors (although the guy playing "Lucas" is pretty good). It gets plenty of mileage just out of its genuinely unique weirdness.
