We don’t know that Janis (Joyce Molloy) is Bobby Douglas’s (Stephen White) stepsister when she continually harasses him sexually. As if to somehow justify her actions, she states loudly and clearly that he’s not her brother. Nevertheless, it’s uncomfortable to watch and is, for better or worse, not the most uncomfortable thing we’ll see in Satan’s Children (1975.)
.
Filmed in Florida by the crew of a local TV station that didn’t want their employer to know what they were doing after hours, Satan’s Children has a trashy quality that goes with its characters. Everyone and everything seems… dirty. There’s something about it that’s interesting to me, though. It’s not a “good” movie by any stretch of the imagination, but I kind of enjoy it.
.
If you thought the Right-Wingers hated the gays, you won’t believe those Satanists! When interrogated by Simon (Robert C. Ray II), leader of the cult, Monica (Rosemary Orlando) denies her “erotic desires that are homosexual in nature” and her advances on “sister followers.” Simon threatens “the worst conviction,” banishment, but she starts bleeding from the mouth instead.
.
That’s just the tip of the horn on the goat’s head. The entire cult is militantly homophobic. When they find Bobby lying unconscious on the ground in his tighty-whities and Sherry (Joyce Molloy) wants to nurse him back to health, she’s told that if she gives “special dispensation to a queer,” she’ll “bring all the demons of hell down on this place.”
.
What’s going on here? Yes, Bobby was raped by three men who drove calmly through town with him lying across their laps naked, but the cult members don’t know that. Why do they assume he’s gay? Plus, he’s not gay, that we can tell. He seems to truly fall in love with Sherry, longing for the day he doesn’t hurt so he can perform in bed.
.
If you are gay, queer historian Elizabeth Purchell and AGFA’s Bret Berg tell us on their Blu-ray commentary track that Satan’s Children becomes a fetish film when Bobby runs through the woods in his tighty-whities for, I kid you not, three minutes and 12 seconds. That’s after he escapes the compound when Simon tells him that Satan wants winners, not losers.
.
That’s about the same length of time that the final freeze-frame shot of the film remains on screen after the end credits roll. Editing is a curiosity in the film. During a long dinner scene in which Janis puts her foot in Bobby’s crotch, there are cuts at slightly wrong parts of the conversation. Likewise, we get long scenes of cult members playing soccer. Padding much?
.
I really like Simon. He looks the part of a Satanic cult leader. He’s darkly handsome with jet black hair, thick eyebrows, and a mid-length mustache. He’s sexy in a Freddie Prinze kind of way, using the fingernail of his pinkie finger to play with the mustache. There’s a ring on that finger, of course, and he smokes thin, brown cigarettes, perhaps clove.
.
Amid all the blunt, clunky events of Satan’s Children, I daresay there’s some nuance in the struggle for power that’s happening among Sherry, Joshua (John Edwards), and Simon. This expands into a sort of love quadrangle when you add Monica and Simon, for a second time, who are both jealous of Sherry’s love affair with Bobby.
.
During the last few minutes, the movie kicks into high gear and we witness a kind of montage of Bobby efficiently getting his revenge in a slow-motion gunfire bloodbath, surprisingly effective shadow play of Bobby sawing the bodies into pieces, and presentation to Simon of a bag of body parts to prove the chief Satanist that he was wrong about him.
.
There’s so much obviously wrong with Satan’s Children, yet there’s so much unintentionally right. I even have a theory about the last few minutes which seem different in style from the rest of the film. Perhaps it’s not real, but instead a fever dream as Bobby lays unconscious after all his running through the woods… wish fulfillment for circumstances he cannot control.
Comments