Back in June when we watched “Reefer Madness” we also watched a very curious video on Occult Demon Cassette called “A Witch’s Spiritual Hoedown,” a video of a singing session at a church service that felt like an eternity. We couldn’t understand why it had such an intriguing title without any kind of pay off to its supposed witchiness. Then a few weeks ago, we were wandering around Occult Demon Cassette again in search of things to watch and to our joy we found “A Witch’s Confession,” the next part of the sermon and the part we were clearly actually hoping for. Last night, we finally watched it.
The whole hour and forty minutes consists of a woman talking about the dangers of alternative religions and telling her story about how she got involved in all sorts of things before finding Jesus. She describes her fall as starting with reading the horoscopes in the newspaper, leading to calling psychic hotline, and then buying her own tarot cards (which with her southern(?) accent has too much emphasis on the “o”). Apparently this led her into Wicca, which she describes initially accurately but then insists that Wicca practitioners are all secretly doing black magic even though they claim to only do good magic. She spends a lot of time humblebragging about what a successful witch she was and talks about how she had to move onto voodoo because she had mastered all of what Wicca had to teach her.
The moment we were truly ascended was when she mentioned getting into the Necronomicon. She insisted that the book was not actually a fictional book by HP Lovecraft but that Lovecraft’s father was involved in the occult and after he died he left instructions to his son on how to find the book, which is a real magical resource. Adam commented that this justification sounded like an HP Lovecraft story itself. She apparently moved to California and joined a cult based around it, but left when she decided she didn’t want to be used as a sacrifice.
From there she got into Satanism. She mentioned meeting Anton LaVey on two separate occasions that didn’t fully match up, but she did have pictures of what she claimed was her Satanic altar. She also mentioned all the money she made from her magic shops and while listing a bunch of the types of magic she did like tea leaves and palmistry, she included Dungeons & Dragons. Not sure what magic she was doing with an RPG, but considering the imagination this woman has, it probably was dangerous.
Aside from all the weird bragging, this woman didn’t come off as someone you would want in your church. While she clearly believes in fantastical things, when she “masters” Christianity, won’t she just move onto something else? Adam theorized that she’s probably a Mormon by now because she would clearly be excited by there being another testament to explore.
Overall, it was an enjoyable watch, vastly more enjoyable than the spiritual hoedown. During the last twenty minutes she gets pretty repetitive and we both kind of tuned out but there was some real gold before that.
Of course Adam, the philosopher who has studied religion a lot, pulled out his study Bible to verify some of her claims and from this he came up with a review for the video. From Job 42.3, “Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge? Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”
Spoon Rating: 5
The second Hunchback film by Burbank Films Australia was not bad. It followed the book plot even more accurately. Quasimodo was mostly absent for the first 35 minutes of the 52 minute movie. He acts more like an Igor type character than anything else. The first portion of the movie is more about Frollo's lust for Esmeralda (he's randomly an alchemist in this one), Pierre joining the gypsies and his marriage to Esmeralda (in this one he has a hopeless crush on Esmeralda), and the Phoebus getting stabbed at the tavern subplot. The story progresses as expected and it is surprisingly good at showing and not telling but it definitely overlooks some development in the name of keeping the run time short. Frollo dies in this one too in the usual way and Quasi gets declared innocent by Phoebus when he's just wandering by to prove he's not dead. It ends with some really cheesy affirmations from Esmeralda about how Quasi is good so it doesn't matter what he looks like. Honestly, aside from the Disney version, it's probably the best animated Hunchback adaption we've seen.
