Hungry Wives (1972)

In the years between his legendary "Night of the Living Dead" and his outbreak thriller "The Crazies", filmmaker George A. Romero was actually trying NOT to get pigeonholed as a horror director. This is one of his efforts from that era. It's not for hardcore horror fans; other than a few nightmare sequences, it barely flirts with that genre. It's more of a sometimes arty, sometimes exploitative drama about a suburban housewife named Joan Mitchell (Jan White). Rather dissatisfied with her lot in life, she begins to think about things such as extramarital sex, and the idea of dabbling in the occult.The performances are better than one might expect for such an independent, regional production. Romero uses his script as a set-up for exploring themes such as self esteem & self expression, female oppression, and the generation gap. For a while, it's likely to cause some audience members to be regularly checking their watches, as it rambles on at too deliberate a pace. It begins to maintain interest more consistently after the one hour mark. Regarding its artistic ambitions, Romero does seem to be enjoying himself coming up with those dream sequences. And in terms of exploitative elements, there is nudity both female and male, but never very much violence or gore."Hungry Wives" is fairly serious, but not totally without humor. Fans of the directors' output may want to see it for completions' sake, but it's not going to be for every taste.Six out of 10.

If you are like me and you saw this is a Romero movie and it is categorized as horror, go no further! This is not a horror movie, but more of a housewife drama.You have this married woman, entering what for men would be called a midlife crisis, bored out of her skull because her husband is always at work, secretly jealous of her daughter for having a life, who starts dabbling with witchcraft and having affairs. That's all there is to the movie. She slowly slips into insanity, but that is not horror, merely a medical case.For the first hour nothing happens. Then for the next half hour, we see her burning black candles and having sex (not really seeing it, though). Then the movie ends. Seriously, don't watch this!

This thin and sometimes uncertain movie is never a mess, not even when it seems improvised: the 'arty' cutting is too assured. This is a surprise even though we are dealing with Romero after all who knows what he's doing. But we are only used to him applying his talents to horror, and that's not what 'Season of the Witch' is - it's Diary of a Mad Housewife with exploitation frills and an upstart feel that definitely ain't radical chic. Romero shows a lot of compassion for this landlocked suburban housewife, and explicitly distances himself from her hipster love interest's contempt. But after this weird Cassavettes thing in the first act, everything gets verrry metaphorical - the secondary characters are metaphors for housewife's emotions, housewife is metaphor for social repression - and this works better in horror than it does in drama. Leaving us with a very weird, arty, failed yet accomplished experiment by a guy who loves his medium, kind of a pre-Martin notepad sketch.

This movie was boring, badly produced, the audio was terrible, the acting was amateurish, and the story line was simply ridiculous. It should have been titled; "The Season of the Sexually Frustrated, Bored, 70's Housewife".Any "witchcraft" in the movie was limited to about 10 minutes total-- and was so off the mark, it was ludicrous. Summoning "the Devil" to do a Love spell... Puh-leeez. This is the kind of movie that gives Pagans and Witches a bad rap. Avoid at all costs! You know people, you have to look at a movie as a stand-alone project and forget which "famous" director (etc) had a hand in it. Doesn't matter if they've made masterpieces before or after... when a movie stinks, it stinks! Use a critical and discerning eye!