Review of The Touch of Satan (1971) by William S — 11 Jul 2014

Touch of Satan is the shopworn and fairly predictable story of a young man named Jodie who meets and falls for a beautiful young woman named Melissa, only to discover that she harbors a dark secret and he would have done well never to become involved with her. It features no actors that you're likely to have heard of, has production values that were middling by seventies standards, and brings no new twist to the genre. The only things that set it apart from most other low budget horror movies of the period are its almost glacial slowness and its inability to tell whether it wants to be a horror movie or a sappy romance.

It seemed like the opening credits alone took up five minutes, but it's entirely possible that this is a low estimate. From here, the first half of the film feels like a Lifetime original special as the young man becomes acquainted with Melissa, meets her family, and makes lots of pointless small talk. This is all extremely boring, not just because nothing is happening, but because it takes so long for nothing to happen. Every conversation is filled with long awkward pauses, as if the actors were doing their best to stretch the run time.

There's also plenty of times where you also the feeling that Melissa's parents know a lot more than they're letting on about any number of things, and would tell us if only they could remember what those things were. One almost suspects that everyone in this movie was on downers.

At long last the plot starts eventually going somewhere as we learn Melissa is a witch and that maybe her semi-fossilized great grandmother has more wrong with her than just dementia. Unfortunately this doesn't produce any change in the tone or pacing of the movie. When Melissa shows Jodie the remote shack where she does witchcraft, it's treated not with suspense or unease but as a semi obligatory lyrical interlude. By this point I had practically forgotten about the confusing pre title sequence in which a farmer is pitchforked to death while the editor appears to have a seizure.

Even when Touch of Satan finally gets to the parts that are supposed to be scary, the sad truth is they really aren't. Instead the final act produces only puzzlement and the occasional bad laugh as everyone involved does the very last thing that it would make any sense for them to do.

After seeing a sheriff's deputy brutally murdered, Jodie meekly allows a man twice his age to chain him up in a barn, and when unlocked agrees to hang around and not tell anyone what's happened. A girl who is supposedly possessed by Satan himself shows a baffling lack of evil intent, calmly imploring Jodie that if he'll just believe what she's telling him he can save her. And in my favorite part a man greets a torch wielding mob that's marched to his front door chanting "burn the witch!" with "What can I do for you?".

Eventually the danger passes and the true villain is dispatched in a manner so easy that you wonder if all this trouble could have been solved with a good nursing home. At this point the movie misses its exit cue and shambles on to an ending that tries to be unsettling and romantic at the same time and fails at both. By this point, you'll probably be long past caring.