Yet another classic American International Picture (AIP) from my younger days. These were the movies that warped me, in all probability. A brief review is the least I can do to say "thanks" to those filmmakers. This movie, however, did not warp me. It disappointed me. Cry of the Banshee stars Vincent Price, who plays the Evil Magistrate who enjoys torturing women under the guise of persecuting witches. That sounds like primo GIMP stuff. But alas.

The movie begins with a travesty of a witch trial (is there another kind?) in which a woman is accused of being a witch. When she refuses to admit it, she is branded (nothing to see here), then pulled through the streets being whipped by ignorant peasants until she arrives at the stocks where her feet are locked in. If you look really hard you can catch glimpses of her nipples since her blouse is pulled loose. She is wearing woolen stockings on her feet. All in all, an extremely low GIMP factor. Flashes of nipples, half-hearted whippings, out-of-sight branding and stocking feet. I am not aroused.

There's a party at the Evil Magistrate's house (or I suppose manor) that evening. The teenage son and daughter of the "witch" are brought before the Evil Magistrate and his guests for their entertainment. They are mocked and the boy is made to play a flute kind of thing while the girl sort of dances. The Evil Magistrate's wife asks him not to be such a pig (but not in those exact words) and the Evil Magistrate's daughter is repulsed and walks out. The Evil Magistrate is unimpressed.

One of the hornier men gets tired of watching and drags the girl down from the table where she is sort of dancing, undoes her blouse (but being an ignorant peasant fails to properly expose her breasts), and passes her around. The boy gets upset, fighting ensues, the boy and girl both end up dead, and the Evil Magistrate's wife looks at the bodies in horror, accusing him of needlessly killing them or something. She is pointedly reminded that wives are easily gotten and she'd better STFU if she knows what's good for her. The Evil Magistrate tells his son to take her up to her room.

Meanwhile, all this time we hear a wolf howling in the background, which the assembled guests call a "banshee." It is just a wolf, though, as the "banshee" turns out to be something different. It does not turn out to be the Irish banshee of legend, by the way. I guess the filmmakers just thought it was a cool name and used it. Just an aside.

The son has an argument with his mother (stepmother, actually, as we discover during their dialog), he slaps her a few times, wrestles her to the bed, gropes her, tears the back of her dress, wrestles with her some more, during which there is the briefest flash of breast and nipple, and apparently has sex with her. She does not put up much of a fight. I would have trouble characterizing this as a rape, although she seems generally unwilling or at least is having no fun. The needle on the GIMP meter flickered in anticipation but quickly dropped back to zero.

About 29:00 minutes into the movie we get a scene where the son of the Evil Magistrate shows up at the tavern to rape the new barmaid. Like it is a tradition or something. She isn't all that thrilled about fulfilling this particular tradition, so the Evil Magistrate's son's lackies trap her, undo her blouse, and push her back and forth between them. They manage to release her breasts, so there's quite a bit of boob bouncing going on. Being good lackies, they eventually bring her to the Evil Magistrate's son, who kisses her and releases her and she flees holding her torn blouse to her breast. All is not lost, though, as they discover a pretty woman who is, coincidentally, a witch.

The lackies pull her back onto the table and pin her arms. Her back is arched so that her chest is thrust out, but still fully clothed. The Evil Magistrate's son undoes the laces of her bodice as he "questions" her, but she is wearing something underneath the laces, so no nudity. What was the use of undoing the bodice laces? (That is a rhetorical question.) To save herself from further assault, she rats out Oona, who apparently really is a witch.

The plot thickens as we watch Oona's followers, dressed in white togas and robes, dancing with carefree abandon in front of a stone alter on which a pretty blond girl is laying nude, with her arms crossed over her breasts. Soldiers ride in and shoot a few of them. The pretty nude blond flees with a robe wrapped around her but trips and falls, exposing her breasts right before a mounted horseman drives a sword into her. (No blood, no wound, no gory effect, she is just, you know, dead.) Despite having a naked blond on a stone altar, this scene has absolutely no GIMP-ness to it. I'm wondering what it was I liked so much about this movie. Oona is pissed at the raid and the murder of her followers and subsequently curses the Evil Magistrate as well as his house and wife and children and asks Lord Satan to send an avenger. That would be the titular "banshee."

About 55:00 minutes in, the lackies decide to torture the witch from the stocks by hanging her by her wrists and suspending her over a fire. There is absolutely no heat to this scene. (I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist. No more puns in this review, I promise.) Wrist suspension over a fire and the GIMP-meter doesn't so much as twitch.

Shortly thereafter the lady of the house is mauled to death in the hallway of the manor by something. Some fake blood and a mediocre attempt at gory effects. No GIMP. The Evil Magistrate is incensed. He goes into town and threatens to kill as many of the townspeople as he needs to until someone tells him where to find Oona. Naturally, out of all the men and old unattractive women standing around, they pick out a pretty young blond girl and tie her (fully clothed) onto a wheel under which they've stacked kindling. She protests that she doesn't know anything, so they light the kindling and burn her in a scene that once again fails to pay off in any titillating GIMP fashion.