Satan's Black Wedding

A woman writing a book called "High Satanic Rites," about vampirism in modern-day Monterey, California, commits suicide while under the power of an evil priest. The woman's brother, Mark, sticks his nose in the police investigation and more dead bodies show up, drained of blood. Mark's ex-girlfriend, his sister's research assistant, lends a hand and falls in love with him again. Mark confronts the priest in the basement of a church, where 180 years ago some nuns were praying and conjured the Devil. The Foul One used to enjoy watching Mark and his sister playing near the church as children. Now he wants to initiate both of them into the vampire's coven. Mark tries to escape from the priest and his vampire slaves, but crashes his car and dies.

The fade out of this daffy and very poor horror flick is memorable: Mark, bloodied and disfigured from the accident, stands before an unholy altar to wed to his dead, vampirized sister.

SATAN'S BLACK WEDDING originally played in theaters on a double-bill with the more well-known CRIMINALLY INSANE. Both films are a real endurance test for even the most hardened Z-movie enthusiast. Director Philip Miller is really Nick Phillips, who also directed CRIMINALLY INSANE.

Satan's Black Wedding (1975)

** (out of 4)

Mildly entertaining film has a brother investigating his sister's suicide. He eventually tracks down the killers to a church, which is being used by vampires for Satanic rituals. This is a very cheaply made film running just over an hour and while there's nothing too original going on here it does remain interesting throughout. If you don't expect The Exorcist or Rosemary's Baby then you should get a few minor grins out of this film. There's some nice, if cheaply done, gore scenes to keep things moving. Outside of that we get some really hammy performances, which lead to a couple laughs.

Director Nick Millard's SATAN'S BLACK WEDDING is an interesting little curio of its era. Right off the bat it must be stated that if you're looking for a slick, professional-looking production, then you'd better not bother with this one. Otherwise, it could cause severe cranial blistering.

For those not expecting much, there's a minor miracle at work here, in that, in spite of its heinous cheapness: cardboard sets, thrift store costumes, Walmart vampire teeth, "actors" gathered from some local park, etc., Millard somehow created a bleak horror movie with an unsettling atmosphere of dread and doom.

You'll watch agog, wondering how in the hell something so obviously shabby and inept could possibly give you the shudders!

Watch and be amazed...

Nick Millard's previous film, Criminally Insane, about a fat lady killing anyone who gets between her and her food, was a no-budget classic but this one misses the mark. The atmosphere is creepy enough and there's fang-baring and bloodletting but the film ultimately fails to deliver the hellacious conclusion it hints at. Lead Greg Braddock is so wooden he could be replaced by a bookcase. The scenes where he talks are stultifyingly boring. Ray Myles on the other hand brings a malevolent energy to his role as an undead priest and the film noticeably improves whenever he's on screen. Fans of Andy Milligan might dig the general depravity here but I found it a pretty hard slog.

I had never heard about the 1976 horror movie "Satan's Black Wedding" from writer and director Nick Millard, but given my fascination with horror cinema, of course I opted to sit down and watch the movie, as I happened to stumble upon the movie by random luck here in 2024. I virtually had no idea what I was in for here, but I didn't really harbor much of any grand expectations to the movie given its age and the fact that I had never heard about it.

The storyline was a rather scrambled mess, as it was lacking an overall red thread to lead the audience through the movie. It felt like director Nick Millard had shot many different scenes independent of one another and sat down to edit it into a cohesive movie. The end result wasn't particularly thrilling.

Needless to say that I wasn't familiar with a single actor or actress on the cast list. Nor were I particularly impressed with what I witnessed, as most of the performances were so wooden and rigid that it looked like a first take for a read for an audition. Some of the performers were seriously lacking talents to deliver a convincing dialogue, and the movie suffered terribly from that.

The blood effects in "Satan's Black Wedding" are insanely poor and laughable, it is brightly colored orange paint and doesn't even remotely resemble blood. And then there were the God awful teeth that the vampire creatures had, they looked like the kind of toy dentures that I had as a child in the early 1980s; it was pretty bad.

The editing in the movie definitely also leaves much to be wished for. The editing was pretty brutal and abrupt, with many scenes just ending by a rough cut and then straight into the next scene. And the music in the movie was equally poorly edited and cut in scenes.

My rating of "Satan's Black Wedding" lands on a very generous two out of ten stars.