Satanic

Satanic Panic, remember that.  It was all the rage in the 80s.  People blamed everything on Satan.  Movies, Heavy Metal Music, Dungeons and Dragons, everything was evil and your children were not safe.  There were books and tv shows and special news bulletins all about it on a daily basis. Geraldo Rivera even did a big prime time special all about it.  I remember the special because he used some seriously creepy Goblin style score to play behind a lot of the footage to make it seem even more horrifying.  It even became a trend in Heavy Metal Horror Films, a genre of film that died too quickly. 

Recently this phenomena of panic has gained cult status, as most of these things do.  But not with the generation that went through it, but with the younger generation.  This film, Satanic deals with these people.

4 sort of friends consisting of 2 preppies and 2 goths are headed out to LA, the preppy kid wants to see the Hollywood Walk of Fame and other tourist nonsense.  The goth girl however wants to go and visit different Satanic Panic sights.  The Church of Anton Levee, The Tate house, they even stay in a hotel room that was the site of some weird ceremony where a girl committed suicide to honor Satan himself.

Things take a wrong turn when they stop at an occult store on the strip and encounter the weird devil worshiping owner.  He threatens them and makes them leave.  So what do our 4 friends do.  They go back and night and decide to follow him home. 

Once there they encounter a cult performing a ritual on some young lady.  When one of the followers holds a knife to her throat they scream and run off.  The next day they are contacted by the girl from the ceremony and offer to let her stay with them for the night.

Thant’s when everything goes wrong.  After an evening of drinking, and good old fashioned Ouija board use the crazed cult girl slices her own throat in front of the others.  As this is a murder investigation the LAPD tells them they cannot leave town.  As they sit and wait weird things being to happen.  Their house is destroyed, one of the girls falls ill, dead birds line there pool.  Is it from a spirit, the cult they interrupted, a prank.  As all these things occur they are lead down a long spiral of evil.

The film work in most aspects.  The acting is good, and the plot is actually original, it even has a hell of a good pay off in the end.  I dug the lighting and camera work, but the soundtrack was horrible.  It didn’t fit the tone of the film at all.  The special effects are very well done, although this is not a gory film.  There are a few scenes but this relies more on the atmosphere and paranoia to frighten you.

The disc features a making of, interviews with the cast, behind the scenes on special effects footage, and the original trailer.

If you are into supernatural films or if you just remember the evil time in the 80’s it’s well worth checking out.

Overall 2.5 out of 5 Stars!