Director: Paul Wendkos
Writer: Jimmy Sangster
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org
A young woman, unbeknownst to her, is being groomed to eventually give birth to the devil’s child. Strange events start to surround her as she begins a relationship with a young man.
Merry Christmas, everyone. Here’s a movie about Satan! This timing was not intentional, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t delight me.
A woman is having troubled dreams in bed. A black cat climbs her window, casting a shadow across her while a man walks down the street, his shadow joining the cat’s. Visually, very Exorcist meets Nosferatu, and I won’t fault the movie for that. The flick is cribbing from other pictures, but doing it in a way that’s invoking a visual shorthand as opposed to directly ripping things off (that comes later). In the beginning the movie is hitting specific notes so you know what you’re watching and that allows the movie to quickly move to its central plot. Which then moves slowly.
Anyway, the woman gives birth, has her daughter taken by a nun, and then has a fatal fall down a flight of stairs when confronted with the cat from her window. The nun goes to the house of the man from the street, who is holding a gathering of high-society types, and they present the child before an altar to Baphomet. The people gathered pledge to guide the girl's life so that nothing goes wrong.
22 years later, Jessica, presumably the girl all grown up, now lives in San Francisco as a fashion designer. She’s moved from blessing to blessing as though she has some benefactor looking over her shoulder. Then Andy hits her car which becomes their own meet-cute. Most of the middle of the movie is focused on their courtship. Initially a man is stalking them, taking pictures of Andy’s professions of love, and it turns out the man is part of the cult. Then Andy and Jessica are out horse riding one day and Andy is thrown from his horse. Jessica is knocked down and the man, protecting her, runs in and gets killed. That night, Jessica tries to break things off with Andy noting that this isn’t the first time someone’s died around her—a crush in art school committed suicide and a boyfriend the year before was shot in a hunting accident. However, Jessica is in love with Andy and rushes to find him again.
They plan to get married, but the priest asks Andy to delay the wedding saying Jessica has been touched by Asmodeus and that Andy should find an expert in exorcisms, Father Kemschler, to address the problem. Andy decides on a civil ceremony instead, which, to be fair, is the reasonable response. Then the priest is killed, the church vandalized with Satanic graffiti, and Jessica’s boss is killed for failing to end the relationship. Turns out she was part of the cult and Andy is not part of the plan. The man from the street reveals that if Jessica’s in love with someone else then she won’t be able to become the bride of Asmodeus. So he kidnaps Jessica, hypnotizes her, and makes her forget the previous two years. They both go to visit her aunt who’s also part of the cult, and Jessica basically vanishes from the movie.
Meanwhile Andy sees a news story about a girl in a coma drawing pentagrams like the graffiti he saw in the church, flies to New Orleans, and finds out it’s the daughter of his former lover, Linday. The whole thing’s being orchestrated by the cult who’ve had the daughter possessed to bring Andy and Linday back together and kill his love for Jessica. However, Father Kemschler has broken into Linday’s house and says her daughter needs an exorcism. We get a cheap rip off of the entire second half of The Exorcist and the girl is saved. The cult realizes their plan has failed and spirit Jessica off to parts unknown and Andy and Father Kemschler leave together to try to track her down. THE END
I initially liked this movie's lackadaisical pace (it was a nice companion to my knitting and cocoa-drinking). The whole middle is just Jessica and Andy together with vaguely unsettling events sometimes interrupting their cuddles—a window blows open, a cat breaks a giant window over them, etc. I imagine it’s all due to poor pacing but it made the movie interesting for just how uninteresting everything was. We’re just watching two people in a relationship. Because it’s in the context of this Satanic cult though, there’s always an underlying tension. Until the third act, it wasn’t clear if Andy was part of the plan or not. Were these interruptions and accidents planned to get him out of the way or planned to bring them closer together?
However. once it’s revealed Jessica’s boss is working for the cult and the leader isn’t happy about the relationship, a lot of the drama drains away. The movie also makes the mistake of shifting at this point to focusing on Andy, not on Jessica. She becomes the MacGuffin, the thing both he and the Satanists are competing to possess. Whatever else a MacGuffin is, it’s not a character.
IMDB notes that the movie initially was a pilot for a TV series about Andy and Father Kemschler traveling around the country searching for Jessica and, while I don’t mind that as a plot, it’d be a little more interesting if Jessica were somehow an active part of that--either trying to stay in or escape the cult herself. The fact that she’s kept ignorant really just cuts a lot of potentially novel plots out entirely.
And that lack of novelty is what’s disappointing. I’ve seen other Satanic cult movies, possession movies, etc. and this wasn’t treading new ground. As I noted at the top, initially the movie seems to be working in the shorthand that genre fans would recognize. That’s good because it allows the movie to move into the new things it has to offer. Then it admits that it has nothing new to offer by ripping off The Exorcist and petering to an end.
Here’s a better plot: there’s a power struggle within the cult and different factions are using Jessica in different ways to gain power over the other factions. I very rarely see Satanic cult movies with cultists, amoral power-mad characters who are relatively powerful already, jockeying for power with each other. Likewise, let Jessica in on it. Maybe the producers of these movies think they need a pinch of sexual assault to give the piece that extra bit of frisson or maybe thwarting Satan’s plan isn’t reason enough to stop the ritual if the woman is a willing participant, but what if she’s in on it? What if she wants the power being the bride of Asmodeus will bring her? There’s a nice Hellboy story where exactly that happens and it’s a nice twist in that it makes Hellboy someone who’s killing a demon for being part of a consensual relationship.
Anyway, the movie’s not spectacular. It doesn’t so much drag as amble and, curiously, only gets boring when the “action” kicks off. The third act is when all doubts are cleared up and everything stops being interesting. However, it’s just a TV movie so my standards shouldn't be too high. The film’s in the public domain and I’ve added an MPEG2 copy to archive.org here. I’m sure some fun can be had with it--it’s certainly riffable and passes the time--there just isn’t much in the movie to grab you. It’s merely sort of okay throughout.
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