Hungry Wives (1972)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

SEASON OF THE WITCH/JACK'S WIFE/HUNGRY WIVES/CONJURE WIFE isn't, as many seem to think, a train wreck. There are some good performances (including Ray Laine, more or less reprising his role from THERE'S ALWAYS VANILLA) and Romero's STYLE becomes more recognizable here. As with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and THERE'S ALWAYS VANILLA (as well as the forthcoming shockers THE CRAZIES and MARTIN), SEASON OF THE WITCH concerns itself with sometimes-twisted Human Relationships: it's THE common Theme running through everything that Romero has done. Like Fritz Leiber's classic novel CONJURE WIFE, SEASON OF THE WITCH touches upon the notion of Witchcraft as a cure-all for what ails us; but, like most of what Romero has done, the Truth is Ephemeral at best: what ails us most is mostly just US...

Season of the WitchWomen gravitate towards Wicca, because unlike Christianity it doesn't consider them to be the harbingers of sin.Unfortunately, this horror movie about the earth-centric religion is not the best example of that aforementioned assertion.Plagued with recurring nightmares of her traveling husband, bored housewife Joan (Jan White) seeks the spiritual counsel of her tarot card-reading neighbour (Virginia Greenwald), who is also the head priestess of the neighbourhood coven.Convinced that she too is a witch, Joan goes a little nutty, which results in her using witchcraft to seduce her daughter's TA, and get away with murder.A psychological trip through the mind of a lonely housewife, Season of the Witch is a less- zombified movie than what director George A. Romero is known for; however, it's just as insightful.As for which one is hotter: zombie or witch? When you get Skyclad with a witch their decomposing genitals don't fall off. (Yellow Light)

3 stars for humour (although totally unintended). If you want a cheesy 70's witchcraft B-movie just for some cheap laughs at the wigs and swinging lingo, then by all means, enjoy! The overall idea of this film was pretty good, but it failed to meet the mark. The story seems lost, trying to get itself on track, but frequently gets diverted on a psychedelic trip of misdirection.Bored and disillusioned housewives, alcoholism, the occult, female self-empowerment, the 1970's sexual revolution, bizarre dream sequences... This story is trying to be about so much, and ends up being a jumbled mess. Romero, whatever you were trying to say here, it's totally lost in cinematic translation.I also found this film to be strikingly dated. The "hip" script comes off as silly. Unlike Romero's previous films, this dialouge seems unusually forced and artificial.Anti-climatic. Poorly edited. Corny costumes and effects. Silly dialouge. Meandering and floundering plot. Annoying electronic soundtrack. Lack-luster acting. Cheap film, trying to be artistic, but ends up poorly made, desperate and lost in itself. I had a few laughs, but I wouldn't want to watch it again.Note: For anyone who is a witch, it's likely that this movie won't be as offensive as most "witchcraft" movies tend to be, as it does treat the subject with more sensitivity and accuracy than I had expected.

At a time when George A. Romero wasn't totally sure where his career would go after his debut Night of the Living Dead he tried his hands at doing films that still required the psychological tension of one's environment as a key factor, but changed the tone from the version of horror he spurred on. There's Always Vanilla was one, and Season of the Witch, aka Jack's Wife/Hungry Wives, was another, and it's here that one can see where Romero's career could have gone towards, and the interest picks up in different ways. It's not a film that will please most regular (or rather casual) Romero fans looking for a lot of sharp horror-movie attitude and satire. Then again there is a slight sense of satire in the works at the core of the film, but it's made more closely to ideas of suburban/bourgeois discontent and quiet subservience in a way of life without too much purpose. In fact, I'd liken it a little more towards Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour, with the witchcraft in this case as the substitute for prostitution. Only with Romero there's a specific notion being dealt with as well with the character of Joan Mitchell (Jan White) which links up with other Romero films like Martin and Bruiser dealing with the divided mind, between what's considered normal and completely abnormal and on the darkest tendencies possible.The lack of wit, by the way, is something that kind of has to be adjusted to with Season of the Witch- usually it's one of Romero's finest traits- yet for me it wasn't that big an absence when dealing with the strengths. And oddly enough, a factor I usually don't attribute as strongly as with other Romero films is the screenplay, which for the most part (particularly in the first half) is filled with dialog and scenes that really make the characters a lot more realistic than one would expect with the budget and B-movie character actors. There's even one scene, involving a friend of Joan's friend Shirley (Ann Muffly, her one really significant movie role), who becomes drunk when Joan's daughter has a man over who tries to doggedly mess with her head, that borders on the kind of natural emotional truth of Cassavetes or something similar. Make no mistake, it ends up by extension of that being one of Romero's talkiest films. But he still makes room for his sense of the visual macabre, and, as a link back to Bunuel, obsessive this time with dreams, the obsessive repetitiveness of dreams in a woman who's going down a path that equally terrifies her and entrances her. There's psycho-sexual montages all abound in the dream scenes, and they aren't Romero's best bits of visual fancy (more due to budget than anything), though I'd place the sequences, particularly the first one and another involving a certain shot-gun, as being clever and chillingly in-your-face all the time.And yet, with some strong things going for Romero- a fascinating character and 'small world' of malaise that forms into trouble and infidelity and abandonment of all sanity in surbubia, plus Jan White in a pretty good lead performance surrounded by better ones like Raymond Laine and Muffly- it feels always like a minor work, and with flaws abound. The script itself, along with the direction, hits some pot holes at times, the former when Joan's daughter just up and leaves after a fairly shocking scene where Joan "goes with it" as her daughter has sex in the house and thus kicks a lot of Joan's purpose to go into the witchcraft head-on to possibly 'conjure' her up. The motivation to start with that just seems lacking in the dramatic potential set up all in the first half of the film, making the daughter practically obsolete for the rest of the picture. There are still good scenes to follow, many of them creepy and with a sexual undercurrent, plus a great climax, but there's a lot of clunkiness too (and I loathed the Donovan song as it tried to make a mood that could've been made much more convincing). And as much as Romero brilliantly in spots does his best to overcome the limitations of his shoe-string production, the subject matter by its nature leaves him usually with lackadaisical set-ups and only a handful of really memorable images, mostly with the nightmares.Season of the Witch will likely never be a great film, and it sits mostly in obscurity and aging by the day (albeit with an apparently bad DVD release, better ironically to find the most recent of VHS releases if possible), but I was still glad I saw it as a fan of Romero's, as even a lessor work always holds a little promise. I always admire when filmmakers can try new things and pull them off to the extents that they have in the simplest ways (in this case having a script that gives the actors something to do). That I'd always go for one of the 'Dead' movies or Martin or the Crazies before this goes without saying.