PSYCHED BY THE 4-D WITCH (1972)
So you’ve seen movies in 3-D, Smell-O-Vision, Emergo and Duovision, but how about the first (and hopefully only) film shot in “the Astral World of Transetheric Vision?” After a long intro sequence with a silhouetted woman dancing slowly against lots of cheap psychedelic effects and a catchy title song (“She came from the belly of the Devil’s bitch/beware of the 4-D witch”), we soon realize that the cheap psychedelic effects are the hyped Transetheric Vision, and the plot begins.
“Margo” plays Cindy, who narrates the tale, which amounts to doing the voices for every female character throughout the entire running time. She tells us that “We tend to be very certain that we live in a very solid, very matter of fact, 3-dimentional world,” a fact that she intends to prove wrong. It seems she’d always been fascinated by witchcraft, performing candlelight rituals “which sometimes goes on for hours” with topless Cindy moving Candles up and down and looking around aimlessly. Anyway, one day a strange voice introducing herself as Abigail (possibly an ancestor) speaks out of the ethers (Cindy with a deeper voice) and tells her how to get an orgasm. After a spell is cast, the magic words “let’s fantasy-fuck now” (spoken by Abigail once a week at various times) will cause fantastic sex. Amazingly, this spell even keeps her cherry unpopped, as she’s concerned about “remaining a virgin for daddy(!)”
The first time the words are spoken (well, some of them… the “fuck” gets edited out on subsequent occasions) she masturbates with lots of red lights and reverse-filmed fireworks in the background. The second time it takes her to the presence of her neighbor, Mr. Jones, who responds with a mincing “Go peddle your sex somewhere else, I’m a homo!” But after Abigail turns up her “magnetic field power,” she manages to seduce him anyway, and later seems to win him over to girls entirely. “It was me, and yet it was another me!” our bimbette exclaims.
After telepathically stopping a jogging Mr. Jones and having sex with him again later, she has an oddball dream sequence involving a man strangling himself, a drooling vampire running around a park and a stone mask. She later seduces her aunt, a woman with a Mae West voice (though it’s obviously still Cindy) who claims “I’d never have guessed you were such a sexy wench.” After she watches her best friend have sex with a snake, she begins to suspect something weird is going on after being forced to go necrophile. “Make love to a female corpse? Of a close friend? You are satanic, Abigail! You are a devil worshipper! And this is one of Satan’s rituals for sure, because I read about it.”
At this point, the movie inexplicably switches to Cindy’s brother (at least it’s a different voice) who hallucinates, goes to Chinatown, pets a monkey and seems to be okay. Abigail takes revenge on Cindy by turning him into the king of the sex vampires, making him “an instrument of slow death for many many women.”
There’s no sync sound, so the narration, along with a seemlingly endless number of reprises of the title track (by Johnny By The Way) is all you’ve got on the audio side. Making matters more awkward are edits of the profanity—with all this sex going on, who’d object to the occasional body part being vocalized? The sex itself is pretty silly stuff, edited in with loads of, er, “Transetheric Vision.” For those looking for a acid-induced sex flick that’s slightly less coherent than Ray Dennis Steckler at his worst, this is a must-see.