The Naked Witch (1961)

I'm apparently not the only one who does this. You can turn on the same movie night after night and it will put you to sleep. I've been watching The Naked Witch over and over. Directed by Larry Buchanan. It was bankrolled by a Texas drive-in theater owner who wanted as much nudity in it as possible. It was made in 1960, and apparently very little nudity was possible back then.

It was only an hour long. First there's several minutes of documentary narrated by Gary Owens about witchcraft through the ages with paintings as illustrations. Then there's several minutes of travelogue about central Texas which, it turns out, is full of Germans.

Then we get down to the story. A college boy studying the history of witchcraft arrives in Luckenbach, Texas. He inexplicably digs up a witch's grave with his bare hands and steals the stake that was stuck through her causing her to come back to life. Her clothes had disintegrated over the 120 years she had been buried requiring her to walk around bare naked as she seeks revenge.

It was pretty good. When your only purpose in making a movie is to show as much nakedness as possible, you don't think too hard about the storyline. Contrast this with Plan 9 From Outer Space with its four or five separate plots which all come together in the end.  I found myself mindlessly accepting the implausible digging up the grave thing. The story drifts along. A lot of it is silent with narration. The college boy feels guilty about bringing the witch back to life and feels he should help stop her.

I wondered about the children in this movie. The travelogue portion features a German Texan children's choir all dressed in traditional German costume. Did they know they were in a nudie film? They had a close-up of a little German girl cheerfully singing to the camera. Those poor kids couldn't go to their own movie because it was full of nudity. Although, come to think of it, it wasn't released until four years after it was made so some of the kids might have been 18 by then or may have looked old enough to bluff their way in.