Ah, the early ’70s, when horror films were equal parts occult paranoia, colonial guilt, and shag-carpet chic. Daughters of Satan (1972), directed by Hollingsworth Morse, may not be the crown jewel of occult cinema, but it’s an underrated curiosity — a supernatural slow burn where the paintings move, the dog disappears, and Tom Selleck’s sideburns nearly steal the show.
Let’s just be honest here: Hex is what happens when you throw a western, a horror flick, a biker gang movie, a feminist parable, and a packet of peyote into a blender and forget to put the lid on. The resulting mess is not without curiosity, but it splashes all over the place and leaves viewers with little more than a sticky residue of wasted potential and Keith Carradine’s jawline.
Set in 1919 (a time period chosen seemingly at random), Hex follows a group of post–WWI bikers wandering around the dusty roads of Nebraska as if lost on their way to a better script. They stumble upon a farmhouse occupied by two Native American sisters—one who likes to flirt, and one who likes to hex. When one of the bikers tries to get handsy (with predictably sleazy results), a supernatural revenge plot kicks into gear… slowly. Very slowly. As in, “watching-paint-peel-on-a-weathered-barn-door” slowly.
Motorcycles, Misfires, and Magical Mishaps
The biker gang at the center of Hex behaves less like war-hardened men of action and more like background extras from Grease who wandered onto the wrong lot. Gary Busey—yes, that Gary Busey—is “Giblets,” a name that practically begs to be punished by fate, or poultry. After his failed assault attempt, he meets his end via owl attack. That’s right: an owl. This is not a metaphor. This is not high symbolism. It is a bird with talons to the eyes. Alfred Hitchcock’s birds took over a town—Hex’s owl just really hated bikers.
Scott Glenn plays “Jimbang” with a kind of aimless desperation, as if he’s trying to escape the film by walking off set but can’t find an exit. Keith Carradine’s “Whizzer” is introduced with a swagger and leaves with the kind of expression you wear after discovering your date is actually your cousin. His character arc? He goes from pretending to be a war hero to pretending he wants to get the hell out of this movie.
Cristina Raines as Oriole gives the best performance in the film, but even her efforts are drowned in a sea of tone shifts. One minute she’s a stoic spiritual avenger, the next she’s having sex in a barn with the man she just watched commit a murder. She stabs a toad to kill a woman and curses motorcycles to spontaneously combust. And yet somehow the movie still finds a way to make this boring.
Witchcraft Without Wonder
Director Leo Garen appears to be channeling Alejandro Jodorowsky if Jodorowsky had just woken from a two-week bender and decided to make a horror film with a hangover. There’s atmosphere here, sure—a sparse, bleak countryside, moody twilight shots, a hint of the occult—but it’s never cohesive. The tone careens from mystical dread to awkward romance to psychedelic daydream with no connective tissue to make it feel intentional.
The editing does the film no favors. Some scenes cut off before they develop tension, while others drag on until you start hearing the sweet call of the fast-forward button. Reportedly, the film was re-cut by the studio to emphasize the horror elements, but the result feels like two mismatched halves of different B-movies stitched together, Frankenstein-style, without anesthesia.
Even the soundtrack can’t decide whether it wants to be an Ennio Morricone fever dream or a Spaghetti Western scored by a kazoo. There’s a sense that somewhere buried under the bad sound mixing and tonal chaos, there’s a decent folk horror story waiting to be unearthed. Sadly, it remains buried.
A Curse of Wasted Potential
Hex actually had a solid foundation—indigenous spirituality, postwar male disillusionment, the violent collision between modernity and ancient power—but instead of exploring those themes, it settles for incoherence and limp spectacle. Characters come and go, motivations change like the wind, and supernatural logic is treated with all the seriousness of a Scooby-Doo episode.
The film’s climax, in which motorcycles burst into flames as Oriole dons her father’s shamanic headdress, should be a scene of righteous catharsis or apocalyptic grandeur. Instead, it plays like an outtake from a community theater version of The Craft, minus the budget and with extra flannel.
And then it ends. Abruptly. With jets flying overhead, as if the U.S. military is conducting surveillance on this mess from above and preparing to shut it down. Honestly, they should’ve intervened earlier.
Conclusion: A Hex You’ll Wish You Could Lift
In the pantheon of early ’70s weird horror, Hex is more of a confusing footnote than a forgotten gem. It’s not frightening enough to be horror, not kinetic enough to be a biker movie, and not weird enough to earn cult status alongside El Topo or The Holy Mountain. It’s almost interesting—but “almost” is the saddest compliment a movie can receive.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 magic toads in desperate need of a rewrite.
File under: hexed by its own ambition, cursed by the editing room.
