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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
If you are looking for a lost masterpiece, keep walking because Adventures in Africa No. 7: The Witch Doctor's Magic is mostly just a dusty relic. Anyone interested in weird, early 1930s colonial travelogues might get a kick out of its sheer awkwardness, but normal people will probably just find it boring or kinda offensive. 🎥
It is basically a nine-minute short where this guy Wynant D. Hubbard walks into a village and decides he knows how to run things better than the locals.
The whole setup is wild. Hubbard hears a rumor that these villagers are starving even though the place is practically crawling with wild animals.
Why aren't they hunting? Well, according to Hubbard, a local "Witch Doctor" put a three-month ban on hunting.
So our heroic white explorer steps in to "save" everyone by chasing the guy away. It has that same awkward, staged feel you get in other old sensationalist films like Ingagi, though this one is luckily much shorter.
You can truely feel the camera crew trying to make Hubbard look like a savior.
There is this one shot where Hubbard is talking to the villagers, and you can tell they are just waiting for the director to yell "cut." They look so incredibly tired of this guy.
Also, the "Witch Doctor" himself is clearly just a local guy wearing some extra feathers who was probably told to look "menacing" for the lens. He does not look magical, just annoyed.
The pacing is also super weird. One minute we are looking at some grainy footage of antelopes, and the next, Hubbard is suddenly the king of the village.
It is hilarious how fast the conflict gets resolved. He basically just tells the guy to leave, and boom, movie over. 🤷♂️
I guess if you are writing a thesis on early cinema propaganda, this is gold.
For the rest of us, it is just a bizarre little footnote in film history that you watch once and immediately forget.
1926