Satanic Double Feature:
Prime Evil(1988) and Satan’s Slave(1976)


These two films that feature black robes and naked breasts satanic ritrual type scenes.
Prime Evil is like no other in the history of film for me. I am an avid fan of puppetry, especially bad puppetry in horror films. There is no question which film has the crappiest puppet of them all. The depiction of Satan in this film appears to have been made of Papier-mâché. The same is true of a creature in the film Terror Overload, but that film was clearly tongue in check, which is not the case with Prime Evil.
This film has an undercover nun infiltrating a pack of Satanists. The one of them has a granddaughter who is a fully grown woman whose a virgin because her father made child pornography of her (she reveals this to her boyfriend in a hilariously poorly acted sequence) which is required for one of their rituals to summon Satan. The granddaughter is a social worker and then all the chicks the satanic cult kidnap are the hookers she works with, the leader of the cult is priest trying to seduce the granddaughter- something along those lines.
I’m not even going to try and go through all the holes in the plotline of this film. It is an oddly paced film as well. It is also very difficult not to laugh out loud thinking of that crappy puppet. The soundtrack is cool, minimal electronic incidental music with the classic 80’s horror film feel. They did manage to have a couple of very beautiful actresses take go topless for this one. The dated hairstyles and clothing are also amazing in this film. I laughed at this one a lot. It’s a joke. This film must be watched in the spirit of mockery. It doesn’t work or even make sense to watch it in any other light.
I do have a real affection for puppets and the use of puppets in 80’s horror films though. I’ve listed Ghoulies as my favorite film a number of times. I don’t know what it is. I suppose they just make me laugh.
Satan’s Slave is on the other side of the disk I have with Prime Evil on it. A Trip With Teacher and Brain Twisters are on the same disk but neither of those films are worthy of an entire review. A Trip With Teacher is the one with the teacher and a bunch of teenage girls in the van that are kept hostage by two bikers which is just to implausible. Brian Twisters is a really bad 80’s film, I don’t think it was released any form until the 90’s.
Satan’s Slave is a nice British flick from the 70’s with somewhat the feel of the “folk horror” films of the 60’s and 70’s such as Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan’s Claw, and The Wicker Man, this one also has a good. Norman J. Warren is perhaps best known for the unfortunate film Insemenoid, one of a number of bad films with human female being raped by aliens or other strange creatures including Galaxy of Terror and Humanoids from the Deep. This is not to say that Satan’s Slave is not sexually whacked out, the dude is in love with his cousin in it. Its another film with a lot of black robes and naked breast kind of action in it. It opens with one of those black robe naked chick on the altar scenes. Actually, there’s a real viscous sexual assault scene in the first few minutes of the film. Victoria York goes to visit her uncle who stays with his son and her cousin Steven and the uncle’s secretary Francis who bangs Steven. The car explodes with her parents in it Steven though has an incestuous fixation with his cousin. They get it on too. But Catherine has all kinds of psychic visions of a witch being killed and other things. The uncle is into black magic, and casts a spell that makes her boyfriend back in London jump off a building. Wait, the chick gets it on with her cousin and they don’t make anything of the fact that its incest in the film!
The evil uncle’s secretary reveals that the uncle wants to bring this ancient witch back to life through her in a ritual to bring back an ancient witch that she is a direct descendant of, which has to be performed by her 20th birthday, and the race to escape the British manor is on.
They did some half-way decent horror flicks in the 70’s over in the U.K.