Satan’s Storybook looks like one of those deals where the director had two or three unfinished/abandoned/unreleased movies, cobbled them together, and passed them off as an “anthology” horror film. I’m not saying it’s totally without merit. I mean, any time you start a flick with Ginger Lynn Allen dressed as a Ninja, you’re doing something right. However, things go downhill from there awful fast.
Allen stars in the “Wraparound” (**) segments as a warrior woman sworn to bring her Satanic Queen sister (Leslie Deutsch) to justice. Her boyfriend just so happens to be Satan (Ray Robert, a beefy guy with a skull face who probably inspired Mortal Kombat’s Shao Kahn), and he sends his minions out to find her. While waiting for his Queen’s return, he asks his jester (Michael Daevid) to tell him some scary stories.
The first tale is about a serial killer named “The Demon of Death” (* ½) who likes to pick his victims at random out of the phonebook. The killer (co-writer Steven K. Arthur) murders a young woman’s parents and is arrested before he can kill her too. Six years pass, and the killer still hasn’t been executed. The woman (Leesa Rowland from The Class of Nuke ‘Em High 2, 3, and 4) then turns to black magic to make sure he gets what’s coming to him. Naturally, things don’t go as planned.
Even though this story starts off well enough, it quickly goes down the tubes once the killer is arrested. From then on, it just twiddles its thumbs way too much and the twist ending, when it finally does come, is rushed and unsatisfying. While the wraparound sequences look slightly more polished than your typical SOV horror flick, The Demon of Death is just about what you would expect from the genre. The lighting is crappy, the cinematography is cruddy, and some of the actors are visibly reading from their scripts. It also doesn’t help that the so-called Demon of Death just looks and acts like your typical ‘80s metalhead dude, which is to say he isn’t very intimidating.
The second story is called “Death Among Clowns” (*). It stars the author of The Howling, Gary Brandner as an alcoholic clown that commits suicide in his dressing room. A demonic clown (writer/director Michael Rider), sporting a silly looking tail) then arrives to drag him to Hell.
Sure, it’s funny to see Brandner in his only acting role (a Howling 4 poster is briefly glimpsed in the first story as well), but it’s painfully obvious that he is not an actor. It doesn’t help that he spends nearly all his screen time in a shoddy looking clown get-up. As bad as he is, Rider is twice as annoying, and their unending banter makes this story feel like it lasts an eternity. Another debit is the fact that it’s a straightforward story and no attempt whatsoever is made to give it a twist ending, something that’s a virtual perquisite for an anthology horror movie.
While shot on video, the wraparound sequences of Satan’s Storybook look better than many of its ‘80s SOV contemporaries. The use of red lights in the opening works rather well, and the throne room scenes are more inventive than many horror flicks that were shot in somebody’s backyard. That said, once it switches over to the stories, it looks and feels more like your typical SOV crap. Adding insult to injury is the fact that the wraparound ends with a cliffhanger to a sequel that never happened. (Thank God.)
I’m sure Ginger worked on pornos that had ten times the budget this one had. Fortunately, her performance is the best thing about the movie, which helps make it go down smoother than expected. She looks terrific (I especially liked the scene where Ginger magically transforms from her Ninja get-up to a more sword and sorcery-inspired wardrobe), and even manages not to embarrass herself during her longwinded monologues. If she can emerge from something like this relatively unscathed, it proves that she has better acting chops than most give her credit for.
No comments:
Post a Comment