Simon, King of the Witches (reviewed by Lisa Marie Bowman)
Simon (Andrew Prine) is a bearded man who lives in a storm drain and who says that he is on a quest to become a god. He also says that he’s a warlock and he wants to make sure that everyone understands that there’s a huge difference between being a wizard and being a warlock. Don’t call Simon a wizard!
Simon’s quest for godhood hasn’t led to much success so he makes his living selling trinkets and charms to gullible people. One night, the police arrest him for vagrancy. While sitting in jail, Simon meets Turk (George Paulsin), a gay male prostitute who quickly becomes Simon’s first disciple. With the help of Turk, Simon is introduced to upper class society. It turns out that Turk’s clients include several very wealthy people. Simon is a hit on the party circuit. Slumming hippies view him as a potential guru. Wealthy people view him as a humorous oddity. Simon meets other occultists and starts to engage in bizarre rituals. He finds time to date Linda (Brenda Scott), the daughter of the totally square district attorney. Some people insist that Simon is a fake and some people say he is the real thing. For his part, Simon is soon getting revenge on all of his enemies and taking part in all sorts of freaky ceremonies as he continues his quest for supreme power.
Don’t let the supergroovy name fool you. Like a lot of films about the 60s and 70s counterculture, Simon, King of the Witches is remarkably dull. The action moves slowly. The plot never really makes that much sense. Andrew Prine gives a wonderfully over-the-top performance as Simon but the rest of the cast never really seems to wake up. The film’s most interesting moments are the ones where Simon effortlessly switches from upper class society to “street” society. Undoubtedly, this film’s portrait of jaded people looking for the new thing and getting taken advantage of by a sociopathic grifter felt very familiar in the 70s. And, actually, I guess it still does. There’s still a lot of wannabe gurus out there and a lot of people who have neither the willpower nor the intelligence to see through them. But the film itself just too boring to really be effective. Probably the most interesting thing about the film is that Simon seems to be a mix of Charles Manson and Rasputin. Like Manson, Simon knows how to take advantage of those who are lost and seeking a place where they can belong. And, like Rasputin, Simon turns his sordid lifestyle into an asset when he’s trying to thrill the stuffy old folks.
As I mentioned earlier, the film’s saving grace is Andrew Prine’s intense performance as Simon. Prine himself was an up-and-coming actor with a bright future ahead of him until his girlfriend, Kathryn Kupcinet, was murdered in 1963. As the boyfriend, Prine was immediately a suspect. Though the police quickly cleared him, the scandal still derailed his career and he ended up spending the rest of his career in films like The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Amityville II, and Simon, King of the Witches.
