Meadhall of the Comitatus

Well, this was . . . interesting.  Can you believe I haven’t reviewed a British horror flick since 2007?  I—well, actually I can.  I’ve yet to see any British flicks reach the high levels of lunacy that Italy tends to provide me, but that’s not to say I’m going to quit trying.  So when I saw a movie with the title “Blood on Satan’s Claw,” I just had to give it a go.

Oh fuck no . . . please tell me I'm not watching The Strangers again!

Premise: 2.5/5

First off, you should be warned that this is a period movie about rustic England in the 1700s or so.  Thou shouldst well expect fancy costumes and really bad renaissance faire English from thine lords and ladies of thee mannorr.  Howerrer ye might were espaiktin’ that from the lords and ladies, ye might weren’t bettin’ to hare sub-fake-poor-Cockney accents and chitterins’ from the ould pour folk, ‘ey?  OK, I think I can promise that’s the last time I’ll ever assault your eyes with that kind of phonetic nonsense.  What I’m trying to say is that the rich folk and people in power talk in faux-Shakespearian to everyone, and the rustic villagers hurt my ears an awful lot.  You have to be ready to deal with that to watch the rest of this movie.

Eye am not amused.

But the good news is that the movie’s not too hard to watch after the initial agitation with the dialog is over.  It’s about young Ralph Gower plowing his lord’s field (NOT a euphemism) one day, turning up what appears to be a skeleton of some inhuman thing—as this is pretty unsettling, he runs off to find The Judge, who’s in town visiting a woman he once was considering marrying.  By the time Ralph can get the cantankerous and lazy judge out to the field to see these unearthed remains, the bones and fur are already gone and the Judge just assumes Ralph is being a dumb hick.  This wouldn’t be much of a horror movie if Ralph really was just being a dumb hick, though, as we soon find out when the children of this village all start to fall in to a Satanic cult led by the ironically-named teenager Angel Blake.  Soon enough things start escalating when the cult kids all run away from home to live in the woods or end up being sacrificed by Angel for “the devil’s skin” that they start developing (basically an icky fur patch over top of their regular skin).  The end goal, of course, is to give the devil all his skin back so that he can rule the world, which the pious, non-murderous, god-fearing villagers are not really so cool with.  Eventually there’s a war between the pitchfork-and-torches mob led by The Judge, who finally decided that maybe it was weird that there were so many deaths and disappearances in that area and that maybe it was worth finally checking things out.  The good guys finally win after several teenage cultists are impaled on pitchforks (f’r realzies!) and the not-fully-skinned-up Satan gets impaled on a tremendously large sword wielded by The Judge and then flung into a fire.

While “Blood on Satan’s Claw” isn’t always the most energetic movie out there, it does do a nice job of building up the kids’ cult while making them sicker and creepier the stronger they get.  There’s also some surprisingly intense scenes—one including the brutal rape of one of the children in the movie (she was probably supposed to be 12 or 14) by another teenager, ending in her death by repeated stabbing with pruning shears.  This is pretty much the moment of the film where you know that the gloves are off.  There were some cool scenes in the beginning of Satan getting in people’s heads and making them crazy (one guy cut off his own hand because Satan made him think that it was actually His Infernal Majesty’s hand trying to throttle him), but this rape/murder of a very likable character is the clincher.  Satan is just not nice.  So it’s a shame that the climactic battle with the forces of evil is so shoddily directed, as the scenes that were supposed to build tension just ended up taking too long and being too repetitive, and the actual “battle” was a rushed and crappy affair overall which really detracted from the movie.

I want to see "Baked Satan" versus Leprechaun in the Hood. Fund it.

Cast: 2.5/5

Bad voice-coaching aside, most of the actors here were pretty decent.  Linda Hayden as Angel Blake is great for the role, moving from harmless but flirty jailbait, to creepy Lolita siren, to almost not-on-Earth-anymore cult leader and bride of Satan.  I was impressed by her, but she’s really the only big standout.  Patrick Wymark is also okay as The Judge, but he’s not really in a lot of the movie, just the beginning and the end mostly.  He has a certain “don’t waste my time with your bullshit” way about him that seems pretty fitting given his position (a judge, if you couldn’t guess), but he’s never convincingly menacing in the few scenes where he’s supposed to be—he just comes off looking like a bit of a grumpy douchebag.  The problem is that there are some much worse actors that we see probably too much of that really bug the hell out of me.  Charlotte Mitchell plays Ellen, a woman whose two children both fall victim to Angel’s cult—despite losing two kids in almost no time flat, she keeps this simple genial mother hen vibe going even at their funerals.  Maybe it’s not Charlotte’s fault, it could just be the writing, but even if it is the writing, I could still do without her getting so much screen time pulling the exact same shtick.  Barry Andrews plays Ralph Gower, and he’s supposed to, I think, be the movie’s true hero.  Again, I’m driven crazy by his simple-but-good-hearted boy shtick which is almost all we ever see him do.  Still and all, even with these minor quibbles, the cast and acting is good enough to keep me from slagging on it too much.

Witch-dunking, or an AWESOME time to rethink how great 3-D movies could be?

Technical: 2/5

One thing I’ll happily say about “Blood on Satan’s Claw” (other than that it has a cool title) is that I like the look of it.  Sure it’s a fairly cheesy rustic Olde Englande setting, but I like the landscapes, misty forest paths, and simple but gothic farmhouses and cabins.  I’m less big on the cheeseball music score, however, as it’s so tinkly and innocuous-sounding that it feels like it belongs in some Disney Halloween cartoon or something.  There’s not much else here in terms of gore or special effects—really only a few people get killed where the camera can catch it, and it’s usually a simple “ha! Stabbed you!” moment than a drawn-out gore fest or torture scene.  I’m OK with that, by the way, but it leaves me with precious little to comment on—except maybe the rape scene I mentioned above.

Good lord this is one of the most unpleasant scenes I’ve seen in quite a while.  It’s not the brutality of the rape or the stabbing, it’s the fact that the scene keeps building up to genuinely horrible proportions.  You know what the cult kids have in store for the girl, but you also know that Ralph heard her screaming earlier and is trying to find her in time and put a stop to what’s going on.  You see each new piece of the dirty ceremony start coming into place, intercut with scenes of Ralph running through the woods trying to find out where to go, and you keep thinking “well, there’s NO way that this girl’s going to suffer what these cultists have planned since our hero’s on the way,” but it keeps on building up.  And then you get the “wait, are you serious?  He DIDN’T get there in time, and now she’s raped and murdered?  FUCK.”  Really a great, if disturbing, scene.

9 out of 10 dermatologists agree: a bloody big knife is the best way to deal with a bad case of "devil's skin."

Popcorn Factor: 1.5/5

This movie’s not bad for what it is, a sort of pre-Children of the Corn “Children of the Corn,” but that’s as much as I’ll say for it.  The cult is cool, Angel is a pretty compelling villain, but the movie has just too little activity going on in it to make it a terribly fun watch.  It’s pretty to look at and has a decently interesting plot, but there’s not much spirit in it outside of a couple very cool scenes.  I can’t really recommend this movie, but by the same token it’s not painfully bad and is pretty watchable.  It’s just not that consistently interesting.

Also: WOOKIE IN THE BASEMENT! Punk'd!