Satanic (2006)

Hello fiends and welcome to Satanic Sunday!  Today’s devilish feature is called Satanic, and was brought to us in 2006 by director Dan Golden. The feature film opens in a great way – a car wreck.  Generally speaking, if someone dies within the first ten minutes of a flick, I’m hooked and want to know more. That, my friends, is suspense.  Though I will say that there was a lot less gore than there could have been for such a bad wreck.  But I digress.

So the gist of this production is that a young girl, Michelle (Annie Sorell), has gotten into a terrible car crash. Her father died, and her face was completely destroyed.  When we first meet her, her face is totally bandaged.  On the bright side, the doctor (portrayed by Angus Scrimm) believes that he can re-create her face like new, so even though she is facing a few grueling surgeries she should come out of this OK (though lets be honest, most doctors would totally not assure a patient prior to surgery that she would look exactly as she did before her face was wrecked…that part kind of threw me, truthfully). The bad news…she has completely lost her memories and has no recollection of anything that happened to her before or during the accident. 

Anywho, once her face is back and she is free to leave the hospital, Michelle is put in a halfway house for ‘bad’ kids.  The hospital gives to her what is left of her ‘belongings’ which consisted solely of a satanic talking board and pentagram planchette. Before taking her to the halfway house, Mr. Bisson (amid lewd jokes and stories) takes her to her own home to collect some of her things.  She grabs a diary (also with a pentagram on it) from her room which appears to Bisson as if it were decorated by Charles Manson. But after fondling a few garments from her panty drawer and letting her get her things together, they head to the halfway house where all the real fun begins.

The family that fosters has quite an odd dynamic. The wife appears to be super religious, calling the girls “Whores of Babylon,” and expecting prayer before bed, and so on. But she smokes, drinks, and we find out confiscates things from the boarders to sell on ebay – and also requests prescriptions for the boarders but keeps them under lock and key ALSO selling them out the back door. Mr. Bisson is clearly a nasty character, usually quite raunchy.  When left to their own devices, however, Michelle and her roommate Dalia (Eliza Swenson) decide to mess around with the talking board to see if they can contact Michelle’s father.  Things heat up, and before you know it Dalia is dead with her wrists slashed.  What appeared to be a suicide to everyone in the house did not convince the detective on the case, but unfortunately he lacked the skills to save…well…any of them.

I won’t give away the ending of the film in the case anyone should wish to indulge, of corpse.

But lets talk about the film itself. The acting was mediocre at best, but the cinematography was actually decent. The plot had a few great points to it but mostly was a bit drawn-out for my taste. Get to the gore already!  The gore itself was actually dissed online, loads of people saying that it was cheap or cheesy gore. To me, it was just clear that the people who made the film were less into CGI and more into handmade gore – and I myself prefer the handmade stuff anyway so the gore didn’t actually bother me at all, I thought it was decently done. The soundtrack was lame, as was the actual sound itself…there were many spots where I had to turn the film up…and up…and up…because I couldn’t hear the characters, but then the music over them was so loud it was vibrating my sub woofer.  They could have done that better. Further, there was one scene in which what was supposed to be a satanic pentagram was painted on the wall with ‘blood,’ though it was pointing the wrong way. Two points up for Satanists, one point up for Pagans. The girl fight at the end was totally lamesauce, and unrealistic...as was the ending.  The ending was actually a total disappointment for me, and I had actually gotten super involved in the story by the last 20 minutes of the film, so I was pretty sad about that.

One awesome thing though was that the doctor brought up a famous psychological case in which a man (they don’t say his name but it was Phineus Gage) got a steel rod to the dome. It went right through his frontal lobe and caused him to go from a nice, normal guy to a completely angry and violent individual. I always thought that case was fascinating so I was pleased it was referenced in this story.  Good show, writers!

So lets get down to it fiends!  Body Count?  This film came in with a nice round eight. Number of killers? Two. Boob count? Three. Cheap Thrills? One. Actual Spooks Endured? One. Raven’s Scream Meter says?  One out of Five Screams – if the ending didn’t totally suck, it would have scored better, but the ending was such a fail I detracted overall points from it. Sorry not sorry. Anyway, it wasn’t the worst film I’ve seen but unless you are super into horror or Satanic stories, you probably won’t dig this film much.  Thanks for tuning in ghosts and ghouls, and feel free to comment below!  Happy Sunday and stay spooky!