Legacy of Satan (1974)

LEGACY OF SATAN is a typically poor independent US horror flick from the 1970s. It's about a Satanic cult of women who hang around in a creepy old basement wearing gothic dresses. As with many witchcraft-themed films of this era, the plot sees them 'curse' an innocent young woman who is subsequently possessed by the Devil. Her partner becomes disturbed by her new bizarre behaviour and things get more and more weird until the eventual climax. With languid pacing and poor production values, LEGACY OF SATAN is best viewed as a curio alone. The acting is as amateurish as you'd expect from the unknown cast and the attempts at atmosphere-building simply don't work very well. The end result is a film which is difficult to sit through beause it feels so tame, drawn-out, and dull.

Legacy of Sat (1974) * 1/2 (out of 4)A bored housewife (Lisa Christian) doesn't have much going on in her life until a Satan worshiper decides she'd make the perfect leader for their cult. Soon the woman is dealing with all sorts of weird visions but her husband isn't going to just let the cult take her over without a fight. Gerard Damiano, best known for DEEP THROAT, directed this rather weird film that has pretty much been forgotten over the years except for those who enjoy seeking out the various "Satan" pictures from the decade. This one here was rumored to have been more explicit at some point but I'm not certain there's any actual proof that it was. Perhaps in the pre-production stages it was discussed but there's nothing evident here to think it was ever shot that way.The biggest problem with this film is that nothing ever really happens. The wife pretty much does nothing except walk around and have various visions and none of them are that shocking, disturbing and they're certainly not scary. I'm really not sure what Damiano was going for because there's no gore so that rules out any shock value. There's no violence so that's another strike against the picture. There's not really any sexuality so there's nothing erotic going on. I'm not sure if he was just trying to create a psychedelic piece of art but that doesn't happen either.LEGACY OF Satan is mildly entertaining in a silly way and especially if you like low-budget movies that deal with this subject. Fans of that subgenre will want to check this out but all others can find much better movies out there.

Apparently, Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano's only non-XXX film was shot with hardcore sequences, but the distributor decided to cut them out and release the film as a regular Grindhouse horror (it played in a double bill with Andy Milligan's Blood); this goes some way to explaining the film's truncated running time (barely 70 mins), haphazard plotting and naff acting. Yet despite the film's shortcomings, it is worth catching as it makes the case that Damiano was a considerable visual stylist, a fine editor and an auteur in possession of a somewhat depressing worldview which runs through much of his work.Legacy of Satan tells the story of a sexually repressed housewife who is targeted by a group of Satanists, who worship a Satan called Rakeesh; the louche bunch of wealthy degenerates put the voodoo on her, and soon she's lying in her previously frigid marital bed with her snatch burning up the sheets. A friend, who happens to be a member of the sect, invites her and her husband to a fancy dress party at the Satanists' pad, and our heroine is inducted into a world of wickedness. The husband, dressed as Harlequin, attempts to save her with what looks to be a light sabre (did Lucas see this?!) but wifey by this time has gone over to the dark side, and colludes in hubby's bumping off. Yet the wages of sin is death, in this case a disfiguring skin cancer which melts the face of the head Satanist and finally infects our lady heroine.The idea that repressed white-bread ladies harbour devilish lusts inside them was explored more fully, and effectively, in Damiano's The Devil in Miss Jones; as in that film, the heroine is punished for her transgressions but we're not left feeling that good has triumphed, just that the end of sexual freedom is exhaustion and, in this case, disease. There's something of a prophecy of AIDS in the skin cancer, which makes Damiano not just the pusher but the Jeremiah of 70s decadence.In terms of the film's look, the director and his cinematographer do a fine job on a limited budget – the shots are effectively composed, with a fine use of bleeding psychedelic colours and atmospheric lighting. There's a particularly hallucinatory sequence where the heroine runs through the mansion which has an Alice in Wonderland, or rather Middleton's Through the Looking Glass, feel about it. Best of all is the relentless electronic score by Arlon Ober and Mel Zelniker, at times mere spooky clichés but at others reaching almost Throbbing Gristle-like proportions of intensity. Damiano, unfortunately, writes pretty wretched dialogue then lumbers himself with actors who deliver his lines like a school play – but Legacy of Satan is, especially for the first 50 minutes, a weird and intense experience with a genuinely malevolent air; it feels like it's been somewhere near Satan, which is some kind of achievement I suppose.If you have the DVD which is part of the Blood Bath 2 collection and are watching on a widecreen TV, zoom in and watch it in 16:9, as Damiano clearly shot it on 16mm expecting it to be blown up and cropped, and it's an open matte print used on the DVD; Damiano's framing in this ratio never looks less than intriguing.

This movie looks and sounds like a home movie, except longer and more tedious. The lighting is amazingly bad. Characters' heads cast shadows on other characters' faces a lot. Impressively bad all-synthesizer score. The vampire wears a 1970s pink ruffled shirt and everybody has 1970s hair. But the editing has got to be the worst of the lot. There are long pauses between the lines of dialog. Characters pause and stare at each other or at their own feet for long periods, then hold perfectly still while they recite their lines. Between that and the muffled sound track it's difficult to follow the story. After an hour of utter tedium, there is a silly fight scene which begins when the hero shows up with a toy sword with a glowing blade.If you were looking for a picture that's so bad there's amusement value in it, _Plan 9 from Outer Space_ would be a better choice. Check out IMDB's list of the director's other work.