Satanic Panic

Virgin Terror-tory

Satanic Panic
USA 2019 Directed by Chelsea Stardust
Arrow Films  Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Very slight spoilers on gory details.

I didn’t bother getting tickets for Satanic Panic at last year’s Fright Fest. I’d heard some bad stuff about it but, since then, I’ve also heard loads of good stuff. A scroll down the armchair critic reviews on the IMDB finds a really mixed bag of verdicts ranging from the truly terrible to the utterly brilliant... and not much really in between. Definitely a bit of a Marmite movie for sure... so I thought I should probably give it a go after all. Especially since it’s branded under the Fangoria label. I don’t think I ever owned an issue of Fangoria but it was a very popular cultural backdrop magazine when I was a child (the kids in school used to pour over it) and it’s nice that now, after some bad times during the last decade, they’re back and fairly popular. It’s nice that they’re branching into movie making too.

So, anyway, this armchair critic’s opinion is, frankly, that the movie is one of the more successful ‘horror comedies’ produced in recent years and I wish now I’d gone to see it on a big screen. It’s actually quite a special movie with a lot of tongue-in-cheek (if not through cheek), healthy irreverence to the sub-genre of horror movie it is close cousins with. Yeah, the plot you’ve seen before in loads of movies and books and it’s the old ‘find a virgin to get penetrated and impregnated by the demon summoned by witchcraft’ plot. In the case of this film, the demon is known as Baphomet

Baphomet of course has been in gazillions of books and movies with this kind of setting, perhaps most notably in Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out and the Hammer movie adaptation. He’s even a character in the Dungeons And Dragons rule book, it turns out.

The virgin sacrifice in this movie is Sam (short for Samantha and played beautifully by Hayley Griffith) who is working the first day of her new job as a pizza delivery woman. In a really rubbish pizza place run by a guy who makes the workers pay him a deposit for the kit to put the pizzas in on the back of the bike (leaving her with no money to buy petrol... and thus allowing her to get stuck in a very weird neighbourhood a little later in the film). This is a shop where the pizza delivery skills have been “passed down orally and anally” over the generations and where one of the employees, who helped her get the job, fancies himself and just wants to get into bed with her (or frankly anyone’s bed). He keeps saying stuff like ‘you can’t handle my authenticity’ and he’s hilarious... like much of the film actually.

Starting off with a great pan around the rich mansion-like house and the neighbourhood before going inside and treating us to an implied point-of-view double murder, we cut to a truly gaudy and almost psychedelic title card which really gets in your face before settling on Sam, the film’s main protagonist and ‘sacrifice to be’, singing a terrible song with, in the words of Simon & Garfunkel, lyrics that ‘strain and tear to rhyme’.

I instantly liked this character and when, after a montage of her first day trying to get some tips from her new job, she takes a delivery to an out of the way place (the mansion like structure from the pre-credits which even has its own miniature hedge maze in homage to The Shining out front)... I totally sympathised when she actively entered the house to try and obtain a tip... blundering into a coven of witches in need of a virgin fast, overseen by, in a deliriously villanous, campy kind of role I’ve not seen her do before, Rebecca Romijn.

Another actress she runs into at some point is Ruby Modine from the Happy Death Day movies and, she’s pretty cool in this too. She plays Rebecca Romijn’s daughter who, with Sam, is on the run from this crazy coven of witches who want nothing but bad, painfully mortal things to happen to them and who are quite capable of conjuring supernatural shenanigans to get exactly what they want.

There are some great set ups... the ‘code of Sams’ which a guy on Sam’s pizza delivery round uses to get her to help him into his house with a sofa is something which comes up in a very surprising way right near the end of the movie and when you get, in dribs and drabs, the full back story of why Sam is still a virgin and just what it means for her to get a job (I won’t spoil this moment for you but the background for the character is beautifully written)... well, you just root for her even more. Heck, there’s even a nice ‘punchline’ moment right at the end of the movie which follows up on her rhyming the word ‘paraphernalia’ with Australia in her song back when we first meet her.

And, well maybe it’s just me but I found the constant humour in this to be absolutely brilliant. I loved the fact that whenever anyone tried to kill Sam they accidentally get killed instead (Rebecca Romijn’s real life and fictional husband turns up in one scene and his accidental and dumb way of dying had me grinning for a while) and, as you would expect from a production company who are an off-shoot of Fangoria magazine, the film is quite graphic in the gory details but there’s a lot of the ‘so gory and over the top it’s funny’ sort of stuff in here. Like the way a man is forced to eject his own intestines through his mouth so Romijn can read his entrails or the fetishistic... oh, I’m just going to quote one of the characters here and say... ‘H. R. Giger lovestick’. It’s all good fun and I really connected with this one.

And then, as the end credits rolled... I found out why.

Turns out the film is co-written by Grady Hendrix. Hendrix, of course, wrote the wonderful, fictional ‘horror novel disguised as an IKEA catalogue’ HorrorStör (read my review here) as well as the delightfully fun and informative Paperbacks From Hell (which I reviewed here) so it’s no surprise, I guess, as to why I liked the writing on this one so much. And it helps when the performers can get just the right blend of ‘self awareness of the stupidity of their plight’ into their roles too. So, yeah, I guess if I’d twigged it was written by him when it played FrightFest, I would have actively sought out a ticket.

That’s me done on this one though. I absolutely loved Satanic Panic and will instantly recommend it to all my horror loving friends. It’s nicely respectful of the genre it flamboyantly pokes fun of and cineastes who embrace the irony and sense of fun should have a thoroughly entertaining time with it. Unlike a few other horror comedies of recent years, this one doesn’t shoot blanks when it comes to the laughs. Give it a go.

Happy Death Day 2U

Bury My Heart
At Wounded Tree

Happy Death Day 2U
2019 USA Directed by Christopher Landon
UK cinema release print.

Well this was an unexpected surprise.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the first Happy Death Day movie (which I reviewed here), especially since I only really went to hear Bear McCreary’s score and found myself caught up in what I personally think is a bit of a modern phenomenon of a teenage slasher movie... the premise of which was that it was another version of Groundhog Day but with the central character, Tree Gelbman, having to relive the same day over and over until she can figure out who it is who’s killing her at the end of the day so she can kill them and reset her life back to normal. It was such a nice idea with a great cast and some neat directorial and writing flourishes that I really didn’t see how they could go anywhere on a sequel which wasn’t just a rehash of the first movie and, yeah... I wasn’t expecting too much from this follow up, truth be told.

Which why it’s such a pleasure to be taken by surprise here because, yep, despite the central concept and the slightly clichéd but nicely handled expansion of that idea of a narrative being based on a repeat loop structure... Happy Death Day 2U is one of those rare film sequels which, while maybe not being quite as good as the first film, certainly lives up to any expectations of what a second part should look and feel like. So yeah, this movie in no way lets the first movie down and is a thoroughly entertaining ride.

Once again the insanely talented and charismatic Jessica Rothe plays Tree and back for the ride are pretty much all the main actors from the first film (and I do mean all) such as Israel Broussard, Phi Vu and Ruby Modine... but the fun doesn’t stop there because the writer/director manages to bring in a new bunch of characters and throws them into the mix too, played by people like Suraj Sharma and Sarah Yarkin. Frankly, it’s a testament to Landon that none of these characters feel like unnecessary add ons and they have a proper place in the continuing story of Tree and her ‘time looping’ dilemma.

And, like I said, the concept is expanded just a little so that we’re following some of the same stuff, in a way but... with different elements thrown into the mix.

So, for example, the film starts off focusing on Phi Vu’s character and as you twig right away, he is obviously going to start off in a loop because, right from the outset, you can see the director putting those little memorable incidents into his walk to his room mate’s bedroom on campus so the audience can pick up on these anchor points for the next time around... which is obviously why they’re there. However, rather than just run with that, Landon very quickly moves you into the next phase of the movie where some other freaky stuff starts happening and... yeah, the beauty of this movie is that, while it still very much uses a repeat structure to tell its story, it doesn’t do it in as static a way as the first and every time you think you’ve got the hang of how the movie is going to go for the rest of the running time, he manages to pull in another slightly different element and this keeps things fresh throughout the whole of picture, I’m glad to say. He even, at one point, manages to bring an audio element in from the first film,  just for a second or two, which acts as a kind of sound flashback to remind the audience of what the next part of a specific cycle should be, without having to add in a visual element to go with it... which impressed me greatly, I must say.

So I don’t want to give away too much here but, yes, you will find out exactly how (if not yet why) the incident in the first film took place and, although in some ways it would have been nice not to have to peek behind that curtain, the catalyst for all this stuff is a story element which has a lot of use to trigger different outcomes throughout the film so... I guess what I’m saying is, if they had to do a sequel, well this one is definitely a good way of solving certain problems. Also, it’s nice to see actors playing very specific character stereotypes in the first movie being given a chance to play their same characters in a different way at certain points. So there’s a lot on offer if you liked the first one and are happy that this isn’t just a repeat. And that includes the opening Univeral logo too... which was in a repeat loop at the opneing of the first movie but for this one... yeah, I'm not giving that away here either.

The film is pure fun from start to end and, surprisingly perhaps, manages to also be quite moving in certain moments. There were tears in my eyes during a specific scene and that’s just not the kind of emotional level that you would normally expect from something that, on the surface, masquerades as just another teenage Hollywood slasher movie. Like the first one, this movie has a lot of heart with the kind of strong, moral centre you’d not necessarily expect to be witness to in this kind of cinematic territory. And once again we have Bear McCreary picking up on the themes and ideas he used on the score to the first movie and expanding on them, enhancing the emotions just as you would hope. He does another great job here and I just wish this sequel score was put out on a proper CD instead of a low quality electronic download (at time of writing this article... I’ve still got my fingers crossed for some kind of physical release in the near future).

So, yeah, I managed to get through this review completely spoiler free, it looks like but, if you are reading this and are thinking of seeing the movie, please make sure you stay through the first part of the end credits. There’s a mid-post credits scene here and it’s fairly lengthy, explains the not so common sensical ending a little better (although I’m still a little baffled by the mechanics of the resolution scene... need to see it again). This sequence also sets up a much bigger picture for the third movie which, given the identity of a character unmasked early on in the film and which at first I thought might be a loose end the writer had forgotten about, might mean that the third film in the series (which I’m very much hoping is inevitable now) will have a much bigger scope to the first two. We shall see.

In the meantime, if you’ve not seen the first film then don’t see this one yet (and in fact don’t even watch the trailer) as it reveals the end of the first movie in a handy recap sequence. So go watch that once first because... well... it’s kind of brilliant. If, however, you’re already an admirer of the first film then Happy Death Day 2U definitely doesn’t fall too short of what your best idea of a version of a continuation of the story could be, I suspect and, frankly, it’s a fun ride all the way through. So go see it.