Review of Satan War

Satan War (1979)
Tinpot spookhouse trash with documondo augmentation
31 August 2018
Credits roll over shots of swirly, melting psychedelia, possibly a gob of that Super-Elastic Bubble-Plastic stuff kids used to huff back in the 70s. Anyway, on to our story...

A nondescript American couple can't believe what a great deal they got in the purchase of their first home. In all honesty, the place is such a tumbledown dump that no self-respecting degenerate would cook meth in it. To make matters worse, the new owners haul in some really atrocious furniture, and that's probably why the resident demons start throwing a fit. Yep, you guessed it... crosses invert, walls shake, slime drips, and the lady of the house is molested by hands unseen. Then, a spiritually sensitive houseguest senses imminent danger, an amateur exorcism attempt fails, and a hooded specter arrives at the house to lightly badger the new occupants. Deciding, finally, that enough's enough, they drive their ugly car into the sunset, leaving their ghostly worries and hideous home furnishings behind them. The end? Um, not quite...

...because out of nowhere, we get a coarsely vivified "mondo"-style scholarly lecture on voodoo rites which has nothing to do with the previously detailed story. Okay, now it's the end.

The most easily attainable video version(which is still rare as hell) is missing an opening scene which is nearly identical to the tacked-on ending, and equally nongermane to the haunted house story. It features what might be the Solid-Gold Dancers in occult attire cutting the rug to some oddly un-satanic soul music, then moving into some sort of hand-jive/interpretive dance ritual(who knew "duck-duck-goose" was a pledge of allegiance to Lucifer?). Meanwhile, a somber narrator schools us on the history of devil-worship.

SATAN WAR is just a wattle-and-daub amateur nosedive, so technically inferior that it may well have been edited with the heel of a shoe and processed in a truck-stop toilet. Gourmets of all-time-worst cinema should find this an especially hearty dish. Others will find it painful, if not fatal.

1.5/10.
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