Viewers beware, this movie is nothing but gruesome murders, satanic rituals, etc & has no redeeming entertainment value at all. The only good thing about this junk is that it ended...oh well. Vincent Price made many good horror flicks in the 50's & early 60's, but as the 60's wore on into the 70's many filmmakers began showing nudity, extremely graphic violence, and even scenes of satanic worship... Sickening! What a shame that this Edgar Allan Poe story was made into an x rated filth indulgence!! If you like Poe, Hawthorne or Vincent Price I recommend that you stick with pre-70's stuff as the 60's revolution culture bred lots of anything goes type stuff at the expense of quality story-telling. If you just want porn & gruesome blood spattering I bet you can find all you want at your local xxx shop.

Well, it isn't that good of a yarn - I just couldn't avoid the pun. In this Vincent Price vehicle (probably one he would loath to admit making) an English village is terrorized by witchcraft, but even more terrorized by the men who vow to rid the land of witches. Vincent Price plays a mad witch-hunter, quick to brand women (quite literally mind you) as witches. When he and his men brutally murder followers of an old witch named Oona (Bergner) she places a hex on Price's house, vowing to kill his bloodline.STORY: $$ (Quite weak. The banshee of the title doesn't play a role. I suppose the howling of a wolf in the background was a simulation for a banshee's scream, but it was a letdown. Also, the characters in this film are hard to like. I guess we're suppose to root for Price's college educated son and his floozy of a daughter, but they weren't very likable characters).VIOLENCE: $$$ (You'll get plenty of tortured women, if that is your thing. One defenseless lass gets burned at the stake for no reason and another witch gets branded with a red hot poker. There is a monster in the film who goes about slashing folks with its claws, adding to the gore and blood departments).ACTING: $$ (Nothing great here. This is Vincent Price at his hammiest. Essy Persson does a good job portraying an unstable woman but Elsabeth Bergner made for a poor leader of witches. The fact that English isn't her first language shows - she seems to struggle through her lines at times).NUDITY: $$$ (The filmmakers seem to use the exposing of a woman's breasts as a metaphor for the exposing of a witch. None of the non witches have nude scenes, but nearly every witch in the film is "exposed" as being a witch).

While i'm interested in seeing every horror movie vincent price has ever made,i happened to search for other American movies featuring actress Essy persson(which i liked in the foreign science fiction film MISSION STARDUST)and that's how i discovered this film.It does have a similar subject as Vincent price's other witches hunter film WITCHFINDER GENERAL but as unsatisfying as that one was,CRY OF THE BANSHEE is even worst.The violence(consisting of people getting blooded by a mostly unseen beast)is dull and repulsive and the nudity (Essy doesn't get naked in anyway in this film)isn't that great either.Most of the personnalities are unsympathetic and some of the dialogue is terrible.If this wasn't a presold product,it's doubtful that it would even have had a theater run.They say making movies is hard but when you look at the final result of this film,you can easily think that anybody could have made a film like this.

You always know what to expect from this genre of low-budget supernatural-historical movies ... peasants with one brain between the lot of them, fine wenches being treated very, very badly, and plenty of over-acting from men wearing tights and funny hats.Cry of the Banshee has all of these elements, and is fairly representative of the genre. It isn't on the same level as cult movies like "Witchfinder General" (also starring Vincent Price), but it does have it's moments. Here Vincent Price plays a wicked lord with a very strange family. He takes great pleasure in finding, mistreating and executing young witches, until he messes with the wrong coven and his entire family is cursed. They soon begin to get gruesomely killed off one by one by a seemingly unstoppable monster. That'll teach 'em.Vincent Price gives a fairly memorable performance here as the evil, sadistic lord of the town. He does the best he can with the script, anyway, which is all a great actor can ever do. Nobody else on the cast is particularly noteworthy, but on the whole it's a fairly competent movie as far as the acting is concerned. On the subject of the script, it does seem to be thing that everyone involved struggled with. The movie had already been sold to the distributors, which meant that the director, re-writers and so on couldn't change it as much as they would probably have liked to, so they didn't necessary end up making the movie they wanted to make.This accounts for the way that some aspects of the film are so much better than others. In some scenes the actors themselves seem pretty bored with it, whereas in others the relish in the opportunity to show their full talent. The scenes involving the witches coven are pretty interesting, and some of the climatic moments are particularly well-shot. Also, the opening credits sequence is instantly recognisable as the work of Monty Python's artist Terry Gilliam, which is pretty neat. However, there aren't enough great moments to elevate it above most other movies of it's kind.If you're a fan of Vincent Price, or of those trashy period movies of the sixties and seventies, you might want to give this one a look. Otherwise, it probably won't appeal to you that much.