Some of your universe's critics are unfair to The Witches Mountain. For example, reviewer preppy-3 calls the film a "VERY slow-moving, incomprehensible and endless movie." Reviewer catfish-er writes, "The film was not effective on any level." And reviewer BaronBl00d writes, "I could watch the film another ten times and still not know more now than I did after the first viewing."
Read on for a fair appreciation of The Witches Mountain...
A luxury car pulls up to a gated mansion. A young woman named Carla gets out of the car and tells her servant Oscar to take the car to a mechanic to check the brakes and steering. She enters the house and looks for her cat, Circe, only to find its bloody body on a bed. She also sees a message in lipstick on a dressing mirror: INFIDEL.
A little girl named Guerda surprises Carla by walking into the room with a huge blue teddy bear. Precociously, Guerda says she’s angry with Carla. “It was all because of that stupid cat of yours!” Then she says, “I have strict orders to take you to the others.” She also admits she killed the cat because it was bothering Chi-Chi, a snake.
Carla fiddles with a gasoline can and suddenly there is a massive explosion!
(Intriguingly, Guerda and Chi-Chi are never seen again, though they have much potential for a spin-off film, perhaps even a television series.)
We are then introduced to photographer Mario and his gigantic mustache. He is surprised to find a non-exploded Carla in his apartment. He asks why she is in his apartment. “Because I love you, that’s why,” she replies.
“You know, you’re forcing me to be disagreeable,” he says, for unknown reasons.
Carla offers him two plane tickets to Brazil, but he immediately picks up the phone and asks his photo editor for an assignment. “You want me to do what? All right, I’ll do whatever you say. I’ll leave tomorrow.”
“You’ll be sorry for that, you hear?” Carla says. She leaves in a huff.
Mario drives his Jeep—whose engine, incidentally, sounds like that of a tiny motorboat—to a beach, where he photographs with a telephoto lens a woman in a bikini without her awareness. Suddenly, she turns and sees him. Instead of running away, Mario walks over to the woman and asks, “Can I stay a while?”
She tells him he can stay but he has to give her the negatives of the photos he took.
“You shall have them. And as punishment for my impertinence, I’ll invite you to lunch.”
“All right. It’s not a bad idea.”
“What are we waiting for?” They leave the beach to go to a restaurant, where she reveals that she’s a writer and he tells her he has an assignment around some mountain lakes. He invites her to go with him, but she declines, so he simply drives her home. At the gate of her country house, she tells him she has decided to go with him on his assignment.
As Mario sits in his Jeep waiting for the woman, Delia, to turn, he hears the loud chanting of women’s voices. (Cleverly on the part of the filmmakers, it is unclear whether this music is diegetic or not, but it bothers Mario enough that he climbs out of his car and asks Delia about it when she returns.) Mario tells Delia, “I’ve never heard anything like it in my life. It was very loud!”
They arrive at a mountain inn and request two rooms from the innkeeper, who resembles a mutton-chopped Marty Feldman. In her room, Delia opens the window shutters and sees someone looking through her window. She runs out to the hall and Mario tries to investigate the face at the window, but the innkeeper says the inn faces the mountainside so nobody could have been looking in from outside. “I’m too frightened to sleep alone,” says Delia. Mario, even more gentlemanly now than when he was watching Delia sunbathe through his binoculars, suggests they both spend the night downstairs by the fireplace.
Mario wakes up in the morning to find Delia gone. He asks the innkeeper about her but he just grunts.
(Intriguingly, the Mary Feldman-esque innkeeper is never seen again, though he has much potential for a spin-off film, perhaps even a television series.)
The filmmakers cut to Delia wandering through the forest, sleepwalking until she trips and falls to the ground. When she wakes, she calls for Mario, then runs through the forest. Fortunately for all involved, Mario has driven to a lookout point and sees her through his ever-present binoculars, so they are reunited quickly. “Maybe you were sleepwalking,” he immediately concludes.
“I felt like someone was following me,” she says with alarm.
They drive to the top of the mountain so Mario can take photos of mountains for his assignment. He also takes a picture of a hooded goatherd. “Those animals horrify me,” says Delia. It is unclear whether she is referring to the goats or the goatherd.
As they continue to hike in the mountains, they see someone steal the Jeep and drive away. Conveniently, they are only steps away from the goatherd, who points them in the direction of the Jeep (which they saw leaving). Instead of walking down the mountain for help, they follow the Jeep, and soon find it empty with the keys in the ignition. It is near an apparently abandoned village, so they decide to take the car keys and explore the village instead of driving away.
“Not as abandoned as we thought,” Mario says when they see smoke drifting from a chimney. They knock on the cottage door and a woman answers. She says she didn’t see who brought the Jeep here, and she is the only one living in the village. “The old ones are dying and the young ones are going to the city.”
They decide, somewhat rudely, to stay the night, and the woman invites them into her stone cottage. Suspiciously, the woman shoos her cat away and mixes ingredients in a big cauldron. Delia decides to stay with the woman while Mario leaves to take photographs of the village before dark. Artistically, the filmmakers show monochromatic photographic flashes of the women who used to live in the village as Mario takes his photos. During all this, the soundtrack plays a warbling song, possibly in Italian, that sounds reminiscent of both Benedictine monks and Engelbert Humperdinck.
Mario, perhaps predictably, gets lost on the mountain as it gets dark. He hears women singing again, then sees black-robed women carrying torches through the forest. They surround Mario. Then the filmmakers cut to Delia waking suddenly — could Mario’s experience with the women be her dream? Then she has another dream about marrying a bearded man who is either the devil or the god Pan.
In the morning, Mario returns to the cottage and immediately tells Delia of his experience at night involving women with torches.
“Witches!” says the old woman.
“How can you believe in those stupid things?” he replies, somewhat cruelly. “It was nothing more than a funeral.”
“It was a lot more than that.”
Fortunately, Mario shot photos of the procession of women, so he develops the film using his equipment in the Jeep. As the film develops, he tells Delia, “Everything has a logical explanation when you discover its cause.” He is able to print large photos and is surprised to find the artistic shots of women in the village — the village that was empty when he took the photos!
Abruptly, three women come to the cottage and ask for the old woman because there is a serious injury. They take the old woman, and Mario and Delia follow. They overhear the women arguing: “You are not to approach them until the right time! Until the right time! Do you hear me?”
Mario, searching for an explanation for the ghostly photographs, climbs up to a mountain cave while Delia stays at the Jeep. Mario is surprised by a man in the cave who screams at him. Mario chases the man out of the cave. He returns to the old woman’s cabin, only to find a crude voodoo doll stuck with pins.
(Intriguingly, the voodoo doll is never seen again, though it has much potential for a spin-off film, perhaps even a television series.)
He also finds a photo of Delia, which he throws on some hot coals to burn, along with a black cat, a jar full of toads, and a magic spell book.
Suddenly, the cat turns into a blonde woman who attacks Mario but then begins choking on something that can only be a hairball.
Meanwhile, Delia hears women singing (backed by a full orchestra) and walks away from the Jeep to join them.
Seconds later, Mario runs back to the Jeep, where Delia is sitting in the front seat. They drive along the mountain road while the fog sets in. Unable to drive farther in the dark and the fog, Mario parks by the road and sets up a tent. When it is set up, Mario carries Delia from the car into the tent, then they begin to make love.
Shockingly, a group of women invades the tent, pulls the couple out, ties Mario up, knocks Delia out, and begins a bizarre ceremony involving highly choreographed dancing
The ceremony culminates when the women put a wedding dress on Delia. One of the women reveals herself to be Carla, Mario’s old girlfriend. Then we see Delia in a cave strike a chained, bearded man. Mario wakes up in a forest clearing to find Delia running along a forest path. He follows, but Delia runs off a cliff and dies. Mario drives the Jeep back to his house, but waiting for him inside are the cloaked witches.
The End
Perhaps The Witches Mountain can be seen as an allegory about all men who receive their just deserts (and I point out that the correct idiom is "just deserts" and not "just desserts") for photographing bikini-clad women without permission. Perhaps it is about Delia, a beautiful writer who travels with her typewriter and who may or may not be the chosen bride of Satan (or Pan) and who may or may not know she is the chosen bride of Satan (or Pan). Perhaps it is about a group of ghost witches who inhabit the Pyrnenees and create voodoo dolls of random women they want to initiate into their coven. Perhaps it is all of this, and more.
I choose to believe it is simply about a man and the price he must pay for having the most spectacular mustache in the world.