The Touch of Satan

I found this far more watchable than most others seem to have.

A farmer inspects a noise in his barn, which we can see came from a doll. He encounters a killer with a pitchfork. The scene following seems to have a family commenting on the death, suggesting the guy turned out OK. However, it turns out they were talking about something else, as the killer stumbles in - and the family is committed to hiding the crime.

A young man traveling to California stops in the town, and meets a young woman by her family's pond. They take a liking to each other, and she invites him to stay. Unfortunately, they're the family from the opening scene.

She claims to be a witch, and he's skeptical. She claims also to be possessed by the devil, but this seems to refer more to ownership than the devil actually being inside her controlling her actions.

The movie is slow, but has a nice 70s flavor, and a bucolic farm setting. For the gorehounds, there's the opening pitchfork scene (not terribly gory), and a much bloodier kill with a hook used for handling hay bales. There's a flashback to 100+ years ago of the punishment of a witch. The ending is perfect.

Jodie meets Melissa and soon falls for her. But it turns out she's a witch and her 120 year-old sister is a psychotic murderer. You'd THINK this would destroy the couple's relationship...but, oddly, Jodie seems pretty chill about all this.

Over the years, the folks with "Mystery Science Theater 3000" have made fun of many, many, many films. However, sometimes they must have had trouble securing rights to bad films, so they made fun of films that really didn't deserve it. Were these films classics? Not in the least. But a few of the films they made fun of were decent movies, such as "The Girl in Gold Boots", "Mitchell" and "Final Justice". Yet, because they were on "MSTK3000", tons of the show's fans went onto IMDB and gave the movies the lowest possible score. As a result, IMDB's old Bottom 100 List had a couple dozen movies on it that were parodied on "MSTK3000". I am not sure if this was the reason why, but IMDB changed their criteria for admission to this infamous list...increasing the minimum number of votes needed to 10,000 and thus eliminating very obscure low-budget films like these.

Among the two dozen or so movies on the old Bottom 100 list was "The Touch of Satan". Did it deserve to be on the list...or was it like "Mitchell"...a film unfairly targeted for abuse? Yes...and no. While the film is bad, it's not horrid. And, considering the minimal budget and no-name actors, it really isn't that bad. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it was irritating with the old criteria that "The Touch of Satan" made the list and many truly horrendous films didn't...just because of the "MSTK3000 connection.

Thanks to the good, good people of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I have been subjected to a wide variety of tremendously bad movies. Some are worse than others, and some are so horrible that writing commentary on them is almost pointless. (Almost as pointless as why anyone would make the movie in the first place, i.e. 'Santa Conquers the Martians')

But this delightful little film is definitely worth the commentary. Definitely.

The story begins as we're cruising around in a hot, brown maverick with Jodie Thompson: the ill-fated loser/hero of our movie. He winds up at a walnut ranch on his road trip where he meets the frumpy Melissa Strickland, a gal with more than a couple of demons in her closet. Melissa talks Jodie into hangin' around for a couple of days, just enough time to get a first taste of what family life is like at the Strickland residence. Grandma mutilates a few people, Jodie and Melissa do it near her "Dad's" pond, and a couple of souls are sold to Satan. Fin.

The plot itself isn't horrible... but everything else about the movie is. Horrid looking actors, horrid directing and film editing, and let's not forget the horrid dialogue. ("This is where the fish lives" will forever remain one of the funniest, stupidest comments ever said in a film.) In other words, this is a horror film- as in horrific every which way you slice it.

But the film isn't all that unbearable to watch, especially when you have a couple of sarcastic robots at hand. The less seriously you take the movie, the more fun you'll have. And the more fun you have, the easier it will be to make it through the entire movie.

Get's a 2.4 out of 10!

How is this film stupid? Let us count the ways:

1) It centers around the two most lackadaisical characters to ever be the subject of a film. Jody and Melissa spend half the movie sitting in uncomfortable silence, and the other half trading dialogue in accents that never reach any level of emotion, not even when Melissa's loony "grandmother" Lucinda starts skewering people with farm implements.

2) Melissa and Lucinda live out in the middle of nowhere, on what Jody insists on calling a "walnut ranch." Note to screenwriter: ranches usually raise livestock. Walnuts are more likely to be found in an orchard.

3) Besides Melissa and Lucinda, the ranch is also home to Luther and Molly. We assume they're Melissa's parents, until circumstances prove that impossible. Who they really are is aparently none of our business.

4) Melissa insists she's possessed by the devil. Jody refuses to believe her. This will persist, with no variation, for most of the film.

5) In a flashback, we learn Melissa and Lucinda are really sisters, and that Lucinda was nearly burned at the stake for witchcraft by an angry mob (more on them later) until Melissa sold her soul to Satan to save her. This scene, we later learn, takes place sometime in the 19th century. Blaming witches for everything had pretty much gone out of vogue by that time, although blaming minorities was pretty popular, if I remember my history.

6) Satan apparently is inconsistant in his deals. Melissa is allowed to remain young, while Lucinda ages. Then again, Lucinda in her youth looked something like Frida Khalo, so she didn't miss much.

7) About that angry mob--okay, angry isn't the best word for them, since they have about the energy and enthusiasm of a checkout line. How are we supposed to feel about them? They arrive with torches to burn Lucinda for witchcraft, but then it seems Lucinda really is guilty of the crime. It's one thing to portray Christians as narrow-minded, superstitious, and hypocritical, but what happens when they're actually right?

8) During the burning, the mob breaks out into "Amazing Grace." Aparently they only know one verse to the song, since they repeat it endlessly.

9) To save Melissa from the Devil, Jody must sleep with her. We're not sure why this is.

10) Once freed from the clutches of evil, Melissa begins showing her age, which is around a hundred and twenty. Most films would allow Melissa to die, so that her tormented soul may finally be at rest, but nooo--Jody has to sell his soul to the Devil to get her back. This might be a harrowing statement on the powers of darkness, until I recall that having people like Jody and Melissa in the camp isn't exactly an asset for the forces of Hell.

Yes, the movie is pretty bad, and probably deserves the "heckling" it receives when being aired on MST-3000 on Sci-Fi channel. But it is still watchable, all the way to the end. I actually felt a sort of pity towards it: it seemed the movie had a feeling of wasted potential, like someone who could have been successful in life if only they had been allowed to attend a better school.

It brings to mind an excellent comment I read by a reviewer who was commenting on the remade (1998) version of the movie "Psycho" - basically, that it was so pointless, afterall there are so many bad movies out there that deserve to be remade, so why would Hollywood waste time and money remaking the good movies, it makes no sense...

And this movie fits that category exactly. It screams for re-make. It has all the makings of a pretty interesting, if not downright creepy, story: a traveller (driving a Maverick no less) who stumbles off the beaten path, into a remote out-in-the-boonies country location, where he encounters a good-looking girl living with sweaty people... But, she is not what she seems, because in reality she is 127 years old - her youth and vitality being due to a pact she made with Satan a long, long time ago... Oh, and there is death by pitchfork, and rural cops who even consider cowchips in the course of their crime investigation.

Yes, there is a veritable gold mine of possibilities here. So, I nominate this movie as one of the bad ones that urgently needs to be remade, only with better production values, better script, better acting, better overall budget. (And a better soundtrack, too - it needs more songs in it than "Amazing Grace"). I see lots of potential here. Too bad I'm not a producer or a director, I could really do a lot with the basic ingredients that are at hand here. And if the remake doesn't work, well, "Zah!"