Satan War (1979)

Years after his minor career as a TV actor sputtered, Bart La Rue directed his first and only fictional feature. It’s beyond terrible. Satan War, which is padded with long vignettes at the beginning and end, largely concerns a couple enduring torments after moving into a new house that appears to be haunted. Said torments manifest in silly ways, as when brown goop oozes from the stove or the cross on the wall spins upside down as if moved by invisible hands. Through it all, the idiotic residents act as if the haunting problem will solve itself. Or at least that’s how they behave until hooded cultists enter the house with knives. Where the story goes from there is . . . well, for lack of a better word, it’s stupid, but that’s par for the course in Satan War, among the dullest movies ever to invoke the Prince of Darkness in a title. Even those who relish rotten cinema are likely to get bored waiting for things to happen during the main storyline, since most of Satan War’s train-wreck appeal resides in the prologue and epilogue. The prologue is a cheaply filmed black mass that for reasons beyond comprehension includes lots of interpretive dance, and the epilogue—basically the same shot played on an interminable loop for about 10 minutes—features a voodoo priestess gyrating to the rhythm of tribal music. Fair warning: You may start the picture loving the John Carpenter-ish score, but by the time you’ve heard the same three or four abrasive cues several times each, you’ll be ready to scream, and not because you’re frightened.

Satan War: SQUARE

The Touch of Satan (1971)

Lest there be any confusion, low-budget horror flick The Touch of Satan isn’t worth seeing for any of the usual reasons—the pacing is dull, the story is stupid, and there’s nothing frightening about what happens onscreen, excepting perhaps two nasty scenes involving a pitchfork. So why not dismiss the picture out of hand? Because it looks so damn good. The Touch of Satan was an early credit for genius cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, later to achieve cinematic immortality with Blade Runner (1982). Oddly, by the time The Touch of Satan was released, Cronenweth had already notched a major credit, on Robert Altman’s offbeat Brewster McCloud (1970)—so it’s possible he shot this one first and that it sat on a shelf for a while. In any event, it’s possible to ignore everything else about The Touch of Satan and simply enjoy Cronenweth’s painterly lighting and supple camera movies. Particularly tasty is a beautiful and lengthy 360-degree dolly closeup meant to signify a character experiencing psychological torment. That said, there’s probably no avoiding a brief discussion of the plot. Soulful drifter Jodie (Michael Berry) stumbles onto a walnut farm, where he meets beguiling Melissa (Emby Mellay). Despite all the usual horror-flick warning signs, Jodie stupidly lingers. For instance, Jodie learns that Melissa is rumored to be a sorceress, hence her cheerful inquiry: “Would you like to see where I do my witchcraft?” Nonsensical mayhem (eventually) ensues, setting up a predictable twist ending. Excepting Cronenweth’s photography, this picture is so substandard that was the subject of an MST3K takedown, which should indicate whether satiating your curiosity about the early efforts of a great film artist is worth the trouble.

The Touch of Satan: LAME

Blood Bath (1976)

Aping the style of horror anthologies from British production companies, this cheap and dull American compendium matches a forgettable framing device with equally uninteresting vignettes. In the framing sequences, a suave actor rumored to have made a deal with the devil for success in movies gathers several friends for dinner, and they swap spooky stories. Those stories comprise the vignettes. In the first story, a perfectionist murderer makes a deadly mistake while planting a time bomb. In the second story, a soul brother returns from the afterlife to haunt the usurious landlord who evicted him while the soul brother was a mortal. And in the third story, which feels as if it was airlifted in from an entirely different movie, a shifty martial-arts master exploits students by charging exorbitant fees for teaching a secret combat method. While there’s virtually nothing to recommend here, since Blood Bath is interminably boring for most of its running time, the sequence with the soul brother at least has some humor, as when the beleaguered ghost whines about all the paperwork he had to complete in Hell before receiving permission to haunt the landlord. The cast is strictly low-rent, though attentive viewers will spot a young Doris Roberts. As for nominal leading man Harve Presnell, who plays the movie star/dinner host, he enjoyed a respectable if unspectacular career on Broadway and in movies, often showcasing his rich singing voice. Arguably his best-known screen role was that of the aggrieved patriarch in Fargo (1996). One assumes that Presnell did not count among the highlights of his screen career the opening scene of this picture, during which his character marries a demon while the devil, portrayed by a dude wearing silly-looking horns on his forehead, stands nearby and cackles.

Blood Bath: LAME

Criminally Insane (1975) & Satan’s Black Wedding (1976)

          Had its creator been able to express irony onscreen, the trash-cinema oddity Criminally Insane might have become a whimsical shocker bridging, say, the grotesque gore of Tobe Hooper and the wicked wit of John Waters. After all, the story concerns a morbidly obese killer whose victims’ only crime is getting between the killer and food—call it the ultimate snack attack. Despite warnings that Ethel (Priscilla Alden) still isn’t right in the head, her mother brings Ethel home to a small apartment after a stretch inside a mental institution. Then Mom makes the mistake of locking a pantry, the better to curb Ethel’s bingeing. To get the key to the pantry, Ethel stabs her mother to death with a kitchen knife. And so it goes from there. By the end of the story, Ethel has a guest room filled with rotting corpses, and in between murders she gorges herself on whole cakes and other huge servings of food. Considering he spent most of his career making porn, writer-director Nick Millard (billed here as “Nick Phillps”) does a fairly competent job of storytelling, even though his camerawork is ghastly and the performances by his no-name cast are mostly terrible. That said, Alden is so completely bereft of affect that she’s believable as a mindless eating/killing machine. Criminally Insane is cheap and and dull and short (running just 61 minutes), but the perverse premise helps explain why the movie has attracted a small cult following. Director and star reunited for Criminally Insane 2 (1987), and a new team generated the remake Crazy Fat Ethel (2016).

          Alas, any promise Millard showed of becoming a quirky schlock auteur dissipated with his next project after Criminal Insane, the wretched Satan’s Black Wedding. An incoherent supernatural thriller featuring exactly one passable scene, Satan’s Black Wedding follows Mark (Greg Braddock) through a quest to determine whether his sister committed suicide, as authorities suggest. We, the audience, know that she was compelled to slash her own wrists by a creepy priest, Father Daken (Ray Myles), who is also a Satanist and a vampire. As the movie progresses, Daken and those in his sway commit various gruesome murders while Mark learns that his late sister and a friend were writing a book about Satanism. How all the pieces hang together is never especially clear, since Millard’s discombobulated storytelling resembles a sleep-deprived stream of consciousness, and the way composer Roger Stein randomly plays piano, as if his hands intermittently spasm near the keyboard, doesn’t help. Eventually things resolve to that one competent scene, a finale during which Daken explains his twisted master plan. Too little, too late.

          FYI, Millard’s last ’70s effort, .357 Magnum, is purported to be a crime thriller; although the movie couldn’t be tracked down for this survey, reviews suggest it’s incrementally more palatable than the director’s other ’70s fare.

Criminally Insane: LAME

Satan’s Black Wedding: SQUARE

Asylum of Satan (1972)

Mildly enjoyable in that familiar so-bad-it’s-good sort of way, schlocky supernatural thriller Asylum of Satan marked the directorial debut of William Girdler, whose later output includes the fabulously silly shockers Grizzly (1976) and The Manitou (1978). While this first effort lacks the gloss of those subsequent pictures, Asylum of Satan has Girdler’s usual attributes of far-out situations and zippy pacing. Put less gently, the movie is fast and stupid but without the compensatory quality of slick production values. The shaky premise goes something like this—after beautiful Lucina Martin (Carla Borelli) suffers an emotional episode of some sort, her doctor inexplicably transfers her to an asylum run by Dr. Jason Specter (Charles Kissinger). Populated by zonked-out patients wearing white-hooded robes, the asylum is a staging ground for Specter’s weird medical experiments and torture sessions. For reasons that defy understanding, Specter occasionally kills patients in ridiculous ways, such as releasing a vicious snake into a swimming pool so it can kill a patient in the water, or trapping a woman in a room full of bugs. (The image of cheap-looking plastic bugs “moving” across the patient’s body by way of stop-motion animation is particularly laughable.) While Specter terrorizes Lucina, her boyfriend, Chris Duncan (Nick Jolley), tracks her down, only to get rebuffed when Dr. Specter somehow disguises his asylum as abandoned building. One idiotic scene follows another until the climax, when Dr. Specter reveals his ultimate goal of sacrificing Lucina to Lucifer, played by a woman wearing the least convincing devil costume in movie history. Crap-cinema connoisseurs will relish Asylum of Satan, but mere mortals are advised to steer clear. In fact, here’s the best part, just to save you the trouble: During his search for Lucina, Chris learns from a cop that Dr. Specter “was picked up several times for devil-worshipping.”

Asylum of Satan: LAME

Holocaust 2000 (1977)

          Derivative Eurotrash noteworthy for featuring an American star in the leading role and for venturing into fairly extreme places, Holocaust 2000—sometimes known as The Chosen, Lucifer’s Curse, and Rain of Fire—is among the most enjoyably stupid ripoffs of The Omen (1976). Despite being quite slick on some levels, thanks to lavish production values, Erico Menczer’s vivid cinematography, and Ennio Morricone’s wonderfully gonzo score, the picture suffers from an atrocious screenplay and erratic direction. Things get so bad at one point that the film stops dead so Douglas can stand in place while voiceover of previously spoken expository dialogue repeats several times, lest the audience somehow miss the incredibly obvious implications of the storyline. And yet in the movie’s weirdest scene, pure narrative goes out the window as director Alberto De Martino lets loose with an apocalyptic dream sequence featuring visions of the end times intercut with, believe it or not, scenes of an anguished Douglas running across a desert while fully nude. File under “Things You’ve Never Seen,” cross-referenced with “Things You Never Particularly Wanted to See.”

          The ridiculous plot goes something like this: As American developer Robert Caine (Douglas) struggles to get plans for a Middle Eastern nuclear plant approved by reluctant government officials, prophecies and tragedies reveal that the plant is actually a scheme wrought by the antichrist, who, naturally, happens to be Caine’s adult son, Angel (Simon Ward). Yep. Angel. And Caine, as in “and Abel.” In other words, forget the mechanics of the dopey script. Grooving on the storyline’s broad strokes is more than sufficient, because the perverse fun of watching Holocaust 2000 involves laughing at Douglas’ overwrought performance—while secretly acknowledging that, every so often, his intensity gives real edge to the movie—and marveling at the abuse good taste endures in the name of disposable entertainment.

          One subplot involves assassination attempts on the life of a Middle Eastern prime minister, and this narrative thread culminates with a graphic beheading scene involving an errant helicopter blade. It’s as if the filmmakers studied the famous decapitation bit in The Omen, then asked how they could reconfigure the scene to add a provocative connotation. Never mind that the last thing the world needed was another depiction of political violence in the Middle East. Even more dubious is a long sequence set inside a mental institution—while shockingly gory and unquestionably unnerving, the sequence plays like a grindhouse homage to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). That’s not to say Holocaust 2000 utterly lacks imagination. A scene of Douglas caught on a flood plain while the water line rises with supernatural speed is memorably creepy, and the final act of the film echoes the all-is-lost vibe of The Omen, albeit without the benefit of ingenious storytelling. Holocaust 2000 is shameless crap, no question, but if you like your stories dark and pulpy, you may find yourself going along for the ride.

Holocaust 2000: FUNKY

Satanis: The Devil’s Mass (1970)

          Among the many charismatic figures who achieved notoriety in the late ’60s and early ’70s by popularizing alternatives to mainstream belief systems, few courted controversy as actively as Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in 1966 and spent the next two decades preaching dark gospel from his home base in San Francisco. An expert at cultivating media attention, he cheerfully showcased the most sensationalistic aspects of his style of worship—nude women, ritual sex, sadomasochism—while arguing that Church of Satan principles are more intrinsically honest than ideals promulgated by conventional Judeo-Christian faiths. This documentary, which reached theaters with an X-rating, features footage of LaVey officiating a black mass, interspersed with man-on-the-street comments from neighbors, remarks from representatives of other religions, and sit-down interviews with LaVey.

          As a record of a noteworthy personage, Satanis: The Devil’s Mass is valuable, though the filmmakers took such a kid-gloves approach that the movie sometimes feels like a recruitment video. As an entertainment experience, Satanis: The Devil’s Mass is nearly a dud. The ritual scenes are repetitive and ridiculous, while the interview scenes are dull and flat. To the filmmakers’ credit—and, by extension, to LaVey’s—the ritual scenes aren’t juiced with over-the-top elements, so don’t expect suggestions of human sacrifices or anything truly horrific. Yet this restraint creates a viewing challenge, because it’s boring to watch LaVey proselytize at exhaustive length with no one challenging his dubious assertions.

          The ritual scenes, of course, are the real draw. LaVey officiates in a silly-looking costume, wearing a dark cape and a skullcap adorned with horns. Various female church members take turns sitting spread-eagled atop an altar, nude but for the strategically positioned skull prop they use for modesty. Chalices and knives get passed around while LaVey recites gobbledygook and leads chants. Snakes are integrated into the service at one point, and the “highlight” involves a dude climbing into a coffin with a compliant woman for some ritual humping. It’s basically a softcore sideshow, with a guy in a skull mask playing organ for accompaniment.
          During the interview scenes, LaVey explains that his version of Satanism is based on indulgence rather than abstinence, providing an alternative to the fear of punishment that defines Judeo-Christian faiths. This argument goes only so far, because LaVey can’t resist using shock-value anecdotes to make his points. For instance, he describes a man who found joy by increasing his number of daily masturbation sessions, trading the Christian notion of self-denial for the Satanist tenet of self-pleasure. As for the S&M angle, the film features a long and uninteresting scene of a woman whipping a man’s fleshy posterior. Presumably one reason for LaVey’s participation in the project was to show people that Satanists are harmless, and the film certainly makes the one black mass captured on camera seem relatively innocent. No one’s slitting open goats and drinking blood here. Still, it’s hard to reconcile LaVey’s mellow rap about shedding inhibitions with the traditional connotations of Satanism. Accordingly, the lack of journalistic scrutiny makes Satanis: The Devil’s Mass as deep as a puff piece on the evening news.

          FYI, this picture is not to be confused with another title released in the same year, Witchcraft ’70. Made by an Italian company, Witchcraft ’70 is another X-rated survey of Satanism, complete with appearances by LaVey, but it appears that much of Witchcraft ’70 was staged. Satanis: The Devil’s Mass is goofy, but it feels like the real deal.

Satanis: The Devil’s Mass: FUNKY

Satan's Children (1975)

This lethargic supernatural picture seems as if it wants to be a thriller or even an outright horror picture, though it badly misses the mark. The gist is that a young man leaves a dysfunctional household, endures victimization by criminals, and finds a place among a cabal of Satanists. Pervading the movie are equal measures of homoerotica and homophobia. Awkward! Filmed on grungy stock, performed by lifeless amateurs, and set against a backdrop of thrift-store production design, Satan’s Children has the look of bad ’70s porn and the vitality of a drivers-ed movie. Furthermore, because so much of the narrative involves seedy sexual material, from rape to a physical relationship that borders on incest, and because innumerable scenes depict characters suffering abuse for the sin of homosexual attraction, the movie sends a hopelessly convoluted message. At times, the picture seems like nasty fundamentalist-Christian propaganda equating gayness with evil. Yet because the “hero” of the piece finds his bliss by serving the Lord of the Underworld, it’s not as if Satan’s Children qualifies for the Bible Belt stamp of approval.  In any event, viewers able to slog their way through the whole movie might find moments arrestingly weird. In one scene, young protagonist Bobby (Stephen White) tells coven leader Simon (Robert C. Ray II) that he’s offering his soul to Satan. “He doesn’t want it,” Simon replies on Lucifer’s behalf. “You’re a loser.” Ouch. In another scene, when Simon returns from a trip, he checks in with coven member Sherry (Kathleen Archer), who asks, “Did you have a nice trip?” “Okay, I guess,” Simon shrugs. “Did you have a nice hanging?” Dull Satanists passing the time with chitchat—who the hell knew such a thing existed?

Satan's Children: LAME

Satan’s Cheerleaders (1977)

Once you’ve come up with a title like Satan’s Cheerleaders, most of your work should be done. I mean, what’s so complicated about mixing devil worship with sexy teenagers? Based on the evidence of this misbegotten attempt at a comedy/horror hybrid, apparently the process is trickier than it seems, because director Greydon Clark and his collaborators botched the job. Beyond simply being amateurish, dumb, and tacky, Satan’s Cheerleaders doesn’t even have enough sex and violence to pass muster as a guilty pleasure. The story follows a quartet of horny cheerleaders and their goody-two-shoes coach, Ms. Johnson (Jacqueline Cole), through a series of adventures. Among other things, the cheerleaders make fun of a simple-minded janitor, Billy (Jack Kruschen). Later, when Ms. Johnson’s car breaks down while she’s driving the girls to a game, Billy comes along in his pickup truck, abducts the ladies, and announces his plans to rape all of them. Then he gets into yet another accident. After escaping from Billy, the ladies make their way to the home of a sheriff (John Ireland), unaware that he’s the leader of a devil-worshipping cult. Oh, and one of the cheerleaders, Patti (Kerry Sherman), discovers that she has magical powers. Not one moment of this flick is believable or suspenseful, because the acting is as atrocious as the writing, with stupidity guiding the behavior of all of the characters. Jokes fall flat in every scene, leering shots of scantily clad babes are distasteful, and supernatural moments are filmed so clumsily as to create narrative confusion. Sleaze-cinema fans should content themselves with enjoying the movie that the title Satan’s Cheerleaders conjures in their reptile brains, because it’s a damn sight better than this one.

Satan’s Cheerleaders: LAME

Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell (1978)

          Incredibly, the year 1978 birthed not one but two movies about dogs serving supernatural villains, the theatrical feature Dracula’s Dog (also known s Zoltan, The Hound of Dracula) and the made-for-TV thriller Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell. In the telefilm, familiar actors trudge their way through a ridiculous plot, the titular canine accrues an impressive body count, and the whole thing culminates in a low-rent FX sequence that feels like an excerpt from a fever dream. In a too-brief prologue, a Satanist (Martine Beswick) and her accomplices purchase a female German Shepherd from a breeder, then hold a ritual in which Satan is summoned from Hell in the form of a dog to breed with the unfortunate Shepherd. Then the movie introduces businessman Mike Barry (Richard Crenna) and his family—wife Betty (Yvette Mimieux), daughter Bonnie (Kim Richards), and son Charlie (Ike Eisenmann)—in their quiet suburban neighborhood. The family dog is killed in a mysterious hit-and-run accident, and soon afterward one of the Satanists (R.G. Armstrong) turns up in the guise of a traveling fruit vendor who just happens to have adorable German Shepherd puppies available for free adoption. Mike’s kids fall in love with one of the pups, so the dog is given the name “Lucky” and welcomed into the Barry home.

          Weird things start happening immediately, and then people start dying in horrific ways after crossing paths with Lucky. Naturally, Mike is the only person to make the connection, because his loved ones fall under Lucky’s unholy spell. Cue the usual drill of Mike saying to people, “I know this sounds crazy, but . . .” The storyline eventually reaches cartoonish levels of absurdity, as demonstrated by the scene in which Mike tries with no success to kill Lucky with a gun, and the bizarre passage during which Mike travels to Mexico (!) to find an ancient wise man (!!) who tattoos a magical pattern on Mike’s hand (!!!). And we haven’t even gotten to the FX stuff yet. As directed by horror veteran Curtis Harrington, Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell isn’t quite as zippy as it sounds, but the sheer silliness of the endeavor guarantees a high kitsch factor. Crenna looks uncomfortable in every scene, like he’s got a charley horse he can’t shake, and it’s a kick to see Eisenmann and Richards—the kids from Disney’s Witch Mountain movies—acting together in a lesser-known project.

Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell: FUNKY

The Pyx (1973)

          A Canadian-made thriller with elements of character drama, police procedure, and supernatural horror, The Pyx is noteworthy for the presence of American actress Karen Black in the leading role. In addition to contributing poignant and subtle work to many scenes, she sings a few wispy songs on the soundtrack. Although it would be pleasant to report that the movie is a quality piece deserving of Black’s commitment, The Pyx is a rudderless and sluggish, with Christopher Plummer’s half-hearted performance in the underwritten co-leading role of a hard-driving police detective draining much of the energy that Black’s portrayal generates. Furthermore, because of the story’s structure, the stars never have scenes together. By the time The Pyx climaxes with a grim showdown involving Satan worship, the picture has devolved into utter mediocrity. That said, how many movies have been made about Montreal devil cults? The picture opens with the death of Black’s character—she falls or is pushed from a balcony atop a high-rise building and splats on the pavement far below. Two detectives, Jim Henderson (Plummer) and his French-Canadian partner Pierre Paquette (Donald Pilon), lead the ensuing investigation. The movie cuts back and forth between cop scenes and extended flashbacks depicting the final days of Elizabeth Lucy (Black), a heroin-addicted prostitute who ran with a dangerous crowd.

          The cop scenes are rudimentary, with Plummer essaying a tight-lipped tough guy who seems to get off on beating suspects even as he withholds his emotions from his long-suffering girlfriend. Yawn. The investigation itself is just as plodding, because none of the informants and/or suspects makes a real impression. Happily, the flashbacks bear more fruit. Not only do these scenes culminate in a creepy ritual, which adds much-needed visual flair, but Black does a fair job of conveying her character’s angst, confusion, and self-loathing. In one effectively overwrought scene, for instance, Elizabeth tries to comfort a drug-addicted friend while foolishly claiming that she can control her own addiction. The notion, presumably, was to demonstrate why Elizabeth’s psychological wounds made her susceptible to victimization by Satanists. In any event, the true thematic focus of the picture remains as murky as the storyline itself, even though The Pyx features a handful of colorful and emotional peaks.

The Pyx: FUNKY

Blood Sabbath (1972)

Yet another schlocky ’70s horror picture that attempts to blend hippies with Satanism, Blood Sabbath hits the crap-cinema trifecta: amateurish, boring, incoherent. Anthony Geary, later to find his pop-culture niche as long-running character Luke Spencer on the ABC soap General Hospital, stars as David, a confused Vietnam vet who wanders aimlessly through a forest until he’s nearly raped by a quartet of hippie chicks. Later, David meets the quasi-supernatural Yyalah (Susan Damante). She’s an earth spirit or wood nymph or something. David and Yyalah dig each other but can’t have sex, Yyalah says, because her kind dies upon mating with beings with souls. Naturally, this revelation prompts David to seek advice on how to discard his soul. He speaks to a priest who responds to David’s request with a temper tantrum, and then David chats up a witch whose coven conveniently knows how to perform soul-removal ceremonies. Seriously, this is the plot. Very little of what happens in Blood Sabbath makes sense, and the acting is abysmal. Compounding matters is the cheap costuming and hairstyling, which looks like it was done by technicians from a high-school drama club. The cinematography is competent, but that doesn’t count for much since the action occurring inside the pleasantly composed frames is disjoined and silly. For instance, the movie features countless scenes of topless and/or fully nude coven members dancing in the woods; one suspects the producers got a bulk discount by hiring the entire staff of a low-rent strip club. About the only mildly entertaining thing in the movie is the opening credit that promises an appearance by “Dyanne Thorne as Alotta, Queen of Witches.” Rest assured, however, that tame and fleeting scenes including the future star of the porn-ish Isla series are not reason enough to endure this misbegotten flick.

Blood Sabbath: SQUARE

Cry of the Banshee (1970)

          After American International Pictures scored in the ’60s with several Edgar Allan Poe-derived movies starring Vincent Price, the company pushed its luck by occasionally slapping the Poe brand onto Price movies that weren’t derived from Poe stories. For instance, Cry of the Banshee opens with a poem falsely attributed to Poe, then tells an original story that riffs on the narrative of a previous Price film, Witchfinder General (1968), which AIP dubiously reititled The Conqueror Worm in order to force a Poe reference onto the material. Cry of the Banshee is crammed with so many horror-cinema signifiers that it’s a confusing hodgepodge. Although the film does not include a banshee, it does include corrupt inquisitors, grave robbers, rabid dogs, rapists, Satan worshippers, a werewolf (sort of), torturers, and witches. In the course of cramming all of these elements into 91 minutes, AIP skimped on character development and narrative coherence—Cry of the Banshee is all about lurid scenes featuring curses, the degradation of women, and pagan rituals, with Price’s signature style of aristocratic sadism providing a tenuous through line.

          The movie takes place in 16th-century England, where Lord Edward Whitman (Price) is a vicious judge who abuses suspected witches for sport. After a long and ultimately pointless sequence of Edward overseeing the public whipping of a young woman, the movie introduces its proper plot when Edward causes the murders of two siblings from a coven overseen by a witch named Oona (Elisabeth Bergner). The incensed Oona puts a curse on Edward’s family, so a member of Edward’s household, the mysterious Roderick (Patrick Mower), periodically transforms into some sort of hairy monster and kills Edward’s relatives. Between deaths, Edward leads frantic searches for the identity of the killer and the location of Oona’s secret hideout.

          Cry of the Banshee suffers from needlessly obtuse storytelling that can be attributed to aimless scripting and messy editing. The movie’s also quite ugly in its treatment of women, since it seems as if some accused witch and/or innocent serving wench is having her clothes ripped open every 10 minutes. Women are also hung over hot coals, put in stocks, stabbed, violated, and whipped. Nonetheless, Price contributes his usual robust work, the production design is acceptably immersive, and it’s novel to see an animated title sequence created by Terry Gilliam outside of the usual Monty Python context. All in all, Cry of the Banshee is nasty stuff—but that’s probably the point.

Cry of the Banshee: FUNKY

Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby (1976)

          Don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of this sequel to Rosemary’s Baby (1968), because Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby was made for TV eight years after the original picture was released. Cheap-looking, silly, and featuring only one returning cast member, Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby is not without its odd virtues, but it doesn’t exist in the same universe as its illustrious predecessor. When Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby begins, the child whom Rosemary Woodhouse delivered at the end of the first film is eight years old. Raised in seclusion by the Satanists who arranged for Rosemary to be impregnated by the devil, the boy whom Rosemary insists on calling “Andrew” is called “Adrian” by the devil worshippers. Hopeful that she can save her boy from his predetermined fate of becoming the antichrist, Rosemary kidnaps Adrian/Andrew during the first section of the movie, titled “The Book of Rosemary.”

          Suffice to say, her rescue mission fails, which brings us to “The Book of Adrian,” which picks up the story 20 years later. Brooding and impetuous, twentysomething Adrian/Andrew knows that a large number of people consider him special, though he has no idea why. (Or maybe he does—the biggest storytelling problem in the movie is that it’s never clear whether Rosemary’s baby knows his true lineage.) During Adrian/Andrew’s birthday party, the Satanists drug the young man, slather him with mime makeup (!), and perform a ceremony meant to imbue Adrian/Andrew with his biological daddy’s powers. Yet that plan hits a snag, too, leading to the film’s final segment, “The Book of Andrew,” which is the best of the batch because it actually contains a few surprises.

          Director Sam O’Steen, who was the picture editor of the original Rosemary’s Baby, seems utterly confused about how to convey information and where to put his camera, so the movie looks amateurish, and it feels like big chunks of the story are missing. Nominal star Stephen McHattie, who plays Adrian/Andrew as an adult, seems like he’s still emulating the sullen style of James Dean (whom he played in an telefilm broadcast a few months before this one), and he often looks as if he’s about to fall asleep. Worse, it’s deeply distracting to see most of the major roles from Rosemary’s Baby recast, especially since Ruth Gordon reprises her part as chipper Satanist Minnie Castavet. Patty Duke, George Maharis, and Ray Milland replace Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, and Sidney Blackner, respectively. (Also appearing in Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby are Broderick Crawford, Tina Louise, and Donna Mills.) Predictably, Gordon’s pithy asides add as much humor to this picture as they did to the original. 

Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby: FUNKY

Warlock Moon (1973)

Satan worship has rarely been depicted with less excitement than in Warlock Moon, an (extremely) low-budget thriller about a college coed lured onto the grounds of a semi-abandoned mineral spa, where the creepy inhabitants have evil designs upon unsuspecting visitors. Stretching about five minutes of story over nearly 90 minutes of screen time, the silly and tedious Warlock Moon includes several familiar clichés of the bad-horror genre—careless characters walking blithely into obviously dangerous places, comin’-at-ya shock scenes that end up being nothing more than nonsensical narrative misdirection, and so on. Yet even with these time-worn tropes, Warlock Moon never manages to stimulate the viewer. Everything is so predictable, slow, and stupid that it’s impossible to care a whit about the characters. When the story begins, perky college student Jenny (Laurie Walters) is talked into a day trip by would-be newspaper reporter John (Joe Spano). After cavorting and picnicking for several hours, the couple stumbles onto the grounds of a spa that appears to be vacant. They’re surprised, however, by aging resident Agnes (Edna MacAfee), who welcomes the visitors as warmly as she would long-lost family members. Despite a few creepy moments during the initial visit, Jenny agrees to return to the location with Joe. Then Jenny starts to see visions of ghosts and murderers, which John (naturally) dismisses as female hysteria. And so it goes from there, in accordance with the brainless formula for such things. Double-crosses, secret identities, terrible rituals, blah-blah-blah. It’s all been done before, and better. Were one inclined to find points of interest in this singularly uninteresting movie, one could note that the stars later enjoyed minor success on television—Spano was on Hill Street Blues, and Walters was on Eight Is Enough. So there’s that.

Warlock Moon: LAME

The Demon Lover (1977)

At the height of the indie-flick boom of the late ’90s and early 2000s, filmmaker Chris Smith released a documentary titled American Movie, which took the piss out of no-budget cinema by introducing viewers to Mark Borchardt, a hopelessly untalented Midwesterner who makes godawful horror movies. For all the world’s high-minded talk about how anyone can make a film, alas, there’s still a reason why most of the features that get widespread attention are made within the Hollywood system. Amateurs tend to be, you know, amateurish. This context is useful for discussing a 1977 atrocity titled The Demon Lover, which has exactly the same grungy vibe as Mark Borchardt’s magnum opus, Coven. Shot in rural Michigan with a cast mostly comprising doughy Midwesterners, The Demon Lover concerns a coven leader who freaks out when his acolytes refuse to have an orgy. (Never mind that the coven leader is an overweight slob in a mega-mullet who looks as if he spends his life attending Lynyrd Skynyrd concerts and eating at KFC—orgy material, he is not.) Every single cliché of amateur horror is present in The Demon Lover: a demon costume that looks like a third-grader’s art project, George A. Romero-style gore created by fanboys who believe all they need for realism is caro syrup and ingenuity, sets featuring the anemic issue of low-rent smoke machines, weird voices on the soundtrack employed to create the illusion of tension, and so on. It’s all quite embarrassing to watch. Nonetheless, sporting viewers could easily derive 83 minutes of MST3K-style amusement from watching this train wreck, which is occasionally marketed as The Devil Master. The performances are delightfully incompetent, the pacing is nonexistent, the shock scenes are laughably cheap-looking, and the movie even features such choice dialogue as the following: “I don’t care if you drop Bufferin in your tea, I just want to talk!” One can only imagine how mortified the participants were upon seeing the final product.

The Demon Lover: SQUARE

Pick-Up (1975)

          First off, ignore the hilariously deceptive poster provided by the schlock merchants at Crown International Pictures. Far from being a typical sexy-hitchhiker flick, Pick-Up is a deeply strange film—part experimental cinema, part exploitation movie, part softcore porn, part surrealistic freakout. The movie includes astrology, creepy clowns, gentle folk songs, an effeminate senator inexplicably campaigning in the middle of a swamp, metaphorical balloons, a priest molesting a young woman, redneck rapists, Satan worship, and, of course, beautiful hippies having sex. And yet the most amazing part of Pick-Up is that director Bernie Hirschenson somehow manages to make all of this boring until the final half-hour, when Hirschenson jams together so many random signifiers that Pick-Up attains the weird quality of a fever dream.

          Adding to the picture’s unique flavor is the fact that Hirschenson, who also served as cinematographer, is actually quite talented at composition and lighting; although he’s hopeless as a director of actors and as a storyteller, he’s a natural at capturing dreamy, gauzy shots of attractive people. One might even say that Pick-Up transposes the vibe of a ’70s Playboy layout into moving pictures. Thus, long stretches of Pick-Up will be pure ambrosia for viewers who groove on arty nude scenes. For others, however, Pick-Up is a truly perplexing cinematic experience.

          The story—which is really just a premise—begins when Chuck (Alan Long) stops his bus on the side of a Florida highway to take a leak. He spies gorgeous hippie chicks Carol (Jill Senter) and Maureen (Gini Eastwood) lurking in a nearby field, so he offers them a ride. Carol, the dim-witted free spirit of the pair, is all for hitting the road with hunky Chuck, but witchy woman Maureen gets a bad premonition. Nonetheless, she takes Carol’s lead. Soon, the trio gets stuck in a swamp when bad weather forces a detour, so Carol and Chuck pass the time by screwing—in an endless sequence that climaxes with slow-motion shots of the lovers standing together, naked, on a swing as it floats through the air. Later, Maureen deals Tarot cards, flashes back to molestation by a priest, and answers the supernatural summons to an altar in a swamp, where she gains carnal knowledge of some demonic spirit. Then, as the song says, send in the clowns. Literally. A clown shows up to watch Maureen writhe orgasmically while receiving the supplications of her unseen demon lover. Eventually, Maureen gets with Chuck, too, while Carol does interpretive dance until rednecks show up to rape her. Then the clowns show up again, this time with balloons.

          Rest assured the movie is exactly as discombobulated as the preceding description suggests—Pick-Up delivers 80 minutes of elegantly photographed nonsense, edited together in a way that ensures maximum confusion. (It doesn’t help that the movie’s sound recording is awful, so much of the dialogue is inaudible.) Having said all that, the women in the movie (neither of whom is depicted on the poster) are lovely. The petite Senter has a girl-next-door quality and a seeming allergy to clothing, while Eastwood is a raven-haired beauty with mesmerizing brown eyes; although it’s hard to tell if either woman can act, given the context, both are so sexy that it’s surprising neither did more films. Still, it’s probably just as well that the starlets only exist, cinematically speaking, in this one bizarre movie—like everything else in Pick-Up, the actresses appear from nowhere, scramble viewers’ brains, and then disappear.

Pick-Up: FREAKY