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The Touch of Satan
A murderous and decrepit old woman resides on a California walnut farm with her family. On a whim, a traveler named Jodie makes a brief side trip to the farm, where he meets and falls in love with Melissa, the proverbial farmer's daughter. Jodie and Melissa grow closer as Melissa begins to reveal the strange, dark history of her family.
Release : | 1971 |
Rating : | 2.3 |
Studio : | Stupendous Talking Pictures International, |
Crew : | Property Master, Assistant Camera, |
Cast : | Jeanne Gerson Robert Easton Lew Horn Hal K. Dawson |
Genre : | Horror |
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Reviews
Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.
This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.
A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.
It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.
Even if you're a hardcore 'Witches of Eastwick','Charmed', or 'Haxan' fan or someone who has toured filming locations of 'The Craft' and has every line from 'The Crucible' memorized, you'll probably think this movie is still dull and unappealing. If you're into obscure witch movies, watch 'The Devonsville Terror' instead. The film involved a dull family in a sleepy California countryside with a predictable secret and slow, meandering plot. I remember watching it as a ten year old when we were rained out at the lake cabin and had to sit and watch movies featured on local upper-dial antenna channels. I remember this movie mostly for how boring it was. Hoping, like people at a Warhol film screening that something would happen but nothing of any measure really does. Still though, it's great as an episode of MST3k.
Oh, the pauses, there are so many pauses in this movie. Touch of Satan is pretty much just dialog interspersed with a few scenes of action. The problem is, said dialog is exceedingly slow, and the actors keep making pauses, like they are afraid to sound rushed or something. When there is no flow in even the simplest conversation, there is really no flow in the movie. You could actually make this movie as a series of stills, and lose non of the pacing.In most other aspects, I guess this film is sort of OK, just slightly below mediocre. The slow pacing just kills it. Oh, and another thing, the music; there is an abundance of creepy music in the film, probably to heighten the tension, but when played over a scene depicting a guy skipping rocks over a pond on a sunny day, it doesn't really work, it just makes the movie makers seem slightly incompetent.
(spoilers)Did anyone else actually enjoy the mad killer Grandma? At least she wasn't boring, and she didn't perpetually pause like the rest of the cast. Jody's a dull wuss, Melissa's a floppy vacuous Rhoda like girl, and her 'parents' aren't much either. Lucinda's actually alot of fun-from drifting into Jody's room to scare the crap out of him, to stabbing the womany cop to death with a hay hook. And heck, she even almost managed to kill the annoying Jody, so kudos to the crazed old witch for at least providing some entertainment value in this otherwise extremely slow film. And senseless, let's not forget senseless. There are so many things in this film that simply don't make any sense at all. Just who ARE the 'Stricklands'? Are they related in any way, or did Melissa simply force them to live on her ranch and pretend to be her parents? Why did Satan bother to possess Melissa at all, if he/she never intended to return? Don't you think the Devil would have found something for his servant to do in the last one hundred and twenty years besides try to corral her mad sister? Why don't the townspeople realize that Melissa never ages? How does Jody sleeping with Melissa(maybe to prove his 'love' for her was real?) help her escape from her devilish deal? And what kind of moron does it take to sell himself to the Devil just to get seconds? So they're both in the service of the Devil, and the whole beginning of the plot is negated. Melissa doesn't escape her eternal torment, Satan now has puss boy's soul as well, and nothing has been accomplished. Way to go, idiot. Besides these annoying little niggles, there's also the crappy soundtrack, the lighting that makes it appear as though the sun is going nova in every shot, and the apparent sleepiness of all of the cast members except for the dynamic but crazed Lucinda. The Touch if Satan apparently is supposed to make one fall asleep.
Like most who've commented, I saw this film with the help of MST3K, and I have to admit that this is one of the very few films I couldn't watch without it (along with the Coleman Francis trilogy and Manos).There is so much wrong with this film that it's hard to start. The plot (if it can really be called that) is a retread, a boring premise (house with dark secret) that's been done to death in every other horror film ever made. The male lead, Jody (yes, JODY), is an ineffectual dope whose most memorable contribution to the film is yelling "Zah!" The "villain," Lucinda, is an ugly troll-like hag who can only spout gibberish when she's not busy hacking useless side characters into giblets. The love interest, Melissa, is a empty-headed ditz whose most enjoyable moment is showing Jody where "the fish lives" (and, quite fittingly for this film, is the character with the "dark secret").Combine all this with horribly stilted dialogue (it feels like almost 3/4s of the film is pauses, either between lines or between words) and pacing somewhere between "cold molasses" and "glacier" (not to mention the fact that the first verse of "Amazing Grace" is used about 20 times in the film) and you have a movie that doesn't even manage to be affably mediocre or so-bad-it's-good, much less scary. Avoid this film at all costs, unless MST3K are shielding you from this film's dreadful slowness.