MARK OF THE DEVIL (1970)

There were a few really good witch hunting/burning flicks from the 60's and 70's stuff like THE CONQUEROR WORM with Vincent Price and Ken Russell's THE DEVILS and I guess you could throw THE WICKER MAN in there too, but out of all those this one is the one I've gone back to and re-watched the most.  I'm not exactly sure why I like this one over all the others except maybe just for the fact that it is so gratuitous in it's display of the insanity of religion.  You get a tongue ripped out of a poor innocent rape-victims mouth by the roots, water-torture, branding, stretching, fingers lopped off, various more torture and a little more rape all in the wonderful name of organized religion.  As a result this film appealed to me as a young gore-hound and I can still go back to it now and appreciate the message.  Udo Kier is, as always, really good as the sympathetic withchfinders helper and this movie also stars a guy named Herbert Fux which sounds very porno-star-ish. The soundtrack on this sounds really similar to the slow music from CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. There were a bunch of movies re-titled as sequels, all the way up to MARK OF THE DEVIL PART 5:RETURN OF THE BLIND DEAD which was just one of the blind dead movies, but unfortunately there never was an official sequel.  I like to think if there was a sequel our large breasted heroine would get some nasty revenge on Herbert Loms evil Christ-crusader/witch-raper but maybe that's too happy of an ending to such a realistic portrayal of the dark side of human behavior.