The Love Witch

Director: Anna Biller
Year Released: 2016
Rating: 1.5

Or: Lana Del Rey Finally Had Enough of the Fuccbois and Devoted Herself to Satan. Creepy Elaine (Samantha Robinson) - heavy with the makeup! - can't get over being rejected by her ex-boyfriend, so all men she meets are gonna suffer: first she drugs them and then they fall madly in love with her and then they end up dead (often gruesomely). It's a labor of love for the love child of Herschell Gordon Lewis and Russ Meyer - Ms. Anna did the sets, the costumes, the music, the editing and shot it on actual film (!) - but it's also laboriously presented, prone to big speeches and shapeless scenes, a slow crawl when it could have used significantly more pop and sizzle. Sarcasm is fine in limited doses but every time Robinson's character speaks (in voice over or in conversation) you get inundated with it - Biller's (clearly) a feminist, but her insistence that men are "weak and incapable of love" is over-generalizing at best and hateful at worst. "What turns you on?" Elaine asks ... "weeping and silence" is my steadfast response.