User reviews

Bill and Louise Foster move into the house of their dreams but it quickly becomes a nightmare (bwhahahaha!). Goop oozes out of cabinets and coffee pots, little earthquakes keep happening, things go bump in the night, kitchen chairs keep smacking Louise in the ass, and, worst of all, the Foster's cross keeps inverting itself over and over on their wall. "Must be the house settling," says brainiac Bill. Imagine THE AMITYVILLE HORROR filmed on a budget derived from soda can refunds and you will get this 60 minute horror film. Despite the short running time, this drags on for what seems like days and nothing remotely scary (or even unintentionally funny) happens. The dumb couple resolve stuff like green goo dripping from cabinets as "the problems you encounter with a new house." In the end, a psychic friend tells them to get out and they do when a person dressed in black wielding a knife shows up (it is never explained). To pad this out to feature length, the version I saw has an extra 15 minutes of a voodoo dance tacked onto the end. Directed by the amazingly named Bart La Rue, who sounds like he should be a friend of John Waters or Paul Bartel.

I first heard about this true obscurity when it was mentioned in the book 'Shock! Horror!: Astounding Artwork from the Video Nasty Era'. This book was unashamedly all about celebrating the lurid and garish covers that adorned the horror videos unleashed on Britain in the late 70's and early 80's. It was not about documenting the films on their merit, it was all about the video covers. And perhaps the brilliantly titled Satan War is the ultimate example of this philosophy because this is one lousy film that had a very memorable video cover. Its artwork had a hilariously poor painting of Satan sporting a green toga. But as I say, the film…not so good.

It's been made on a real shoestring that much is certain. The main bulk of the film is a riff on The Amityville Horror, which has a newly-wed couple moving into a new house. Right away, scary events begin to happen like a wall-mounted crucifix inverting itself at will, scary gunge and moving furniture. It's so amateurishly done that it becomes very tiresome indeed and to make matters worse it has a synthesizer score that is repeated relentlessly until you feel like your brain has taken a kicking. The central story is padded out to feature length by the inclusion of a couple of 'documentary' scenes that bookend the film. In the opening we have a Satanist ceremony, in the end sequence it's a voodoo ritual. These have the potential to be more interesting but also out-stay their welcome somewhat.

This really is a tough movie to get through. It is very odd. But not in a good way.

Credits roll over shots of swirly, melting psychedelia, possibly a gob of that Super-Elastic Bubble-Plastic stuff kids used to huff back in the 70s. Anyway, on to our story...

A nondescript American couple can't believe what a great deal they got in the purchase of their first home. In all honesty, the place is such a tumbledown dump that no self-respecting degenerate would cook meth in it. To make matters worse, the new owners haul in some really atrocious furniture, and that's probably why the resident demons start throwing a fit. Yep, you guessed it... crosses invert, walls shake, slime drips, and the lady of the house is molested by hands unseen. Then, a spiritually sensitive houseguest senses imminent danger, an amateur exorcism attempt fails, and a hooded specter arrives at the house to lightly badger the new occupants. Deciding, finally, that enough's enough, they drive their ugly car into the sunset, leaving their ghostly worries and hideous home furnishings behind them. The end? Um, not quite...

...because out of nowhere, we get a coarsely vivified "mondo"-style scholarly lecture on voodoo rites which has nothing to do with the previously detailed story. Okay, now it's the end.

The most easily attainable video version(which is still rare as hell) is missing an opening scene which is nearly identical to the tacked-on ending, and equally nongermane to the haunted house story. It features what might be the Solid-Gold Dancers in occult attire cutting the rug to some oddly un-satanic soul music, then moving into some sort of hand-jive/interpretive dance ritual(who knew "duck-duck-goose" was a pledge of allegiance to Lucifer?). Meanwhile, a somber narrator schools us on the history of devil-worship.

SATAN WAR is just a wattle-and-daub amateur nosedive, so technically inferior that it may well have been edited with the heel of a shoe and processed in a truck-stop toilet. Gourmets of all-time-worst cinema should find this an especially hearty dish. Others will find it painful, if not fatal.

1.5/10.

Greatest movie ever ! Don't believe the haters. It's a classic.