(Streamed via Azteca Mas)
A priest (Joaquin Cordero) seems to be losing his grip on his flock. Things grow even more desperate when a smooth-talking Satanic priest (German Robles from the Nostradamus movies) comes into town and begins luring his parishioners away. I mean, how can a priest expect to compete when the Satanist is performing miracles in the street? As he begins to amass a larger following, the Satanic seducer takes to ravaging the local girls and sacrificing them. Not only that, but his presence seems to be causing a rash of murders and suicides throughout the town. Can the heroic man of the cloth stop the slimy Satanic priest before it’s too late?
Satanic Sect: The Lord’s Envoy is buoyed by a great performance by Robles (would you expect anything less?) as the evil priest. With his solemn eyes, sinister smile, and impeccably groomed beard, he sorta resembles F. Murray Abraham. The movie overall can be kind of slow at times, but his performance keeps it from slipping away.
Director Arturo (The Macabre Legends of the Colonies) Martinez does a good job contrasting the main characters’ preaching styles by cutting back and forth during their sermons. He also delivers a great gory ritual scene that would make Herschell Gordon Lewis proud. Robles rips a girl’s heart out, cuts it up into tiny pieces, and then gives his followers blood-drenched hosts. I wish there were more of these kinds of gory set pieces throughout the film, but I’ll take what I can get.
Satanic Sect: The Lord’s Envoy doesn’t always work, but I had fun picking apart how Mexican horror movies (or at least this one) of the era compared to their American counterparts. The young ladies in the cast play mostly the same kind of cliched characters you’d find in American horror films at the time. However, their courtship practices are uniquely Mexican. I’m thinking specifically of the scene where a young girl’s boyfriend surprises her at her window with a Mariachi band in tow. Scenes like this also harken back to the golden age of Mexican horror when the plot would stop cold for an all-out musical number. You wouldn’t see that shit in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5, that’s for sure!
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