My horror movie podcasts’s next movie [that I had not already seen] was meant to be a grind house movie about a witch. My instant internal response was, does that even exist?? Turns out, there’s at least one! (And I’m betting not many more than that.)

Here’s how I knew this was a grind house movie: during the opening credits, every image was a still of a topless actress in some situation we would eventually see during the film. It was perhaps as brazen a series of movie credits as I’ve ever seen, but it definitely said “Buckle up, we’re not fucking around.”

Virgin Witch is a movie about two country mice sheltered sisters who have decided to run away from home and go be models in London. And look, I just cannot talk about this movie interestingly without spoilers, as there’s just too much. So if you want to watch it, (and it’s… it’s not precisely worth watching as a movie, but it might be worth watching as a spectacle. Train wrecks, after all, spectacular.) If you want to watch it, I was saying, stop here.

So the sisters, one or more of whom we are meant to believe are virgins, are hitchhiking at night, because they decided they couldn’t wait until morning to walk to London. And this dude in a Mustang picks them up and drives them to town and gets them in good with a rental room, and apparently that means they are friends with him now? Or possibly more, as things moved kind of fast. If you’re saying, why didn’t they die of hitchhiker pickup already, well, 1971 was a different time.

So they decide to walk around town looking for modeling jobs, during which some dude straight up Trumps the younger, more innocent of the sisters. And they just kind of laugh it off and move on with the movie. It was so very visible and unexpected and never commented upon again, that my conclusion must be either 1) the movie is trying to be subversively feminist by showing the truth instead of shying away from it, or 2) that dude was the director doing the grossest Hitchcock moment possible. Sadly, guess 1 is undercut by the fact that it never comes up again in any context.

Anyway, the older sister takes a job from a lecherous agency owner who has an estate out in the country. Which brings me to the second weird thing about the movie, which to be fair is not unique to this one. Have you ever noticed that 1970s British horror movies (usually about vampires) always portray lesbians as the villain of the piece? I don’t mean every bad guy is a lesbian, but for sure every lesbian is a bad guy. (Men who are gay do not appear to exist.) Anyway, there they are at the lesbian modeling agency owner’s country estate, and photoshoots lead to nudity lead to not quite sex (because, you know, “oops deflowered” would be bad) lead to the older sister learning that there are witches and a coven and she is to be recruited.

The witches have an argument about whether they want the older model sister or the younger came along because it sounded fun sister to be inducted, and they settle on the older one, who is lectured by the high priest of the coven about how he’s all white magic, we don’t do black magic, please don’t touch that book in the library. And so naturally that must be the lesbian’s black magic book, right? (She’s also the high priestess of the coven, of course.)

The rest of the movie gets really weird, well, not the part where the high priest has sex with the inducted sister, because of course that’s a part of the ceremony. But I mean after that, when we learn… oh, I forgot to mention that both sisters were maybe a little in love with the Mustang guy, but he’s in love with the younger sister, which is weird since I think the whole movie covers maybe three days. Anyway, after the first ceremony when we learn that the Mustang guy is coming to their rescue, and the older sister has mind control over the younger sister now, and also the Mustang guy when he eventually arrives, and there’s a second ceremony because she wants her sister to join her as a witch, and after an abrupt unexpected turn, the movie just… stops.

Man, I don’t know. There was a lot to take in, and ultimately I’m not sure I get what they were going for. But leaving aside the lesbian hate, I really do think there’s something under the surface that was trying to deliver a feminist message. I also don’t think it was, you know, successful at this. But trying is cool.