Satan's Children

Satan's Children (1975)

** (out of 4) Bobby (Stephen White) isn't having a very good day. While his stuck-up step-sister sits by the pool his mean stepfather bosses him around making him do all sorts of chores. After finally working up the courage to run away Bobby is then sexually assaulted by a group of homosexuals before waking up in a field where he is discovered by a group of people who turn out to be Satan worshipers!

SATAN'S CHILDREN has one of the wackiest story lines that you're ever going to witness and while the film isn't a masterpiece I thought it was silly enough to be entertaining in its own way. Of course, that depends on the viewer not taking it too serious. This is one of those low-budget movies that were made back in the drive-in era by college kids and it really shows. It's easy to see that the majority of people were working on their only film but this adds a layer of charm to the picture.

Again, if you're looking for a polished Satanic movie then go check out ROSEMARY'S BABY. This film here certainly isn't that but there's so much stuff going on that you can't help but have some fun with it. Poor Bobby goes through all sorts of hardships and it's all done in a rather amusing way. Seeing his time get worse and worse just has something funny about it. There are some pretty campy things that happen at the Satanic cult including one bizarre sequence where a woman is beaten with stones and then buried.

Performances are pretty much what you'd expect from a film like this but I thought White at least kept us glued to what's happening to his character. This here was the second of two films that director Joe Wiezycki made in his career and he can at least say he made something that really isn't like anything else.

This film was marketed as one of those Manson family exploitation/satanic cult flicks that were so popular in the early 1970's (i.e. "The Night God Screamed", "The Deathmaster"), but its really a much stranger animal indeed, managing to combine virulent homophobia with a strong undercurrent of homoeroticism as if the filmmakers themselves were struggling to stay in the closet. A young orphan is sexually teased by his step-sister and abused and neglected by his step-father. He runs away from home, but ends up being gang-raped by a bunch of "queers". Dumped by the side of the road, he is taken in by a gang of erstwhile satanists whose cruel, tyrannical acting female leader falls hard for him. This proves to be a problem when the real male leader returns because, you see, "Satan doesn't like a loser". His disgraced lover ends up buried up to her neck and being VERY slowly devoured by ants, and its up to our hero to rescue her by taking belated revenge on all his various tormentors.

This movie has a very homophobic plot complete with a gay rape-revenge device. The message seems to be that its better go to bed with a cruel, murderous satanist as long as she is of the OPPOSITE SEX than it is to come to terms with your own obvious homosexuality. But not only is the sexuality of the protagonist highly questionable, the crusading heterosexuality of the filmmakers is even more suspect as they show a disturbing number of shots of the protagonist (who like many of his female equivalents in these kind of 70's exploitation films is somewhere between barely legal and hardly legal)naked and bound, or running through the forest in his tight-whities. I suspect the unintentional irony in this film would go over well in a gay film festival.

I would even suspect that the film is being knowingly subversive if it wasn't so completely incompetent. Check out the scene for instance where two guys slowly "drown" in "quicksand", which looks more like a hole filled with Malt-O-Meal, with the drowning even less convincing than the infamous scene Bela Lugosi being eaten by a giant octopus at the end of "Bride of the Monster". So does all this mean I wouldn't recommend this? Hell, no! Most of the entertainment in this film may be completely unintentional but it sure is entertaining. Check it out for yourself. Whether you like it or not, I GUARANTEE you've never seen anything like it!

Bobby is an everyday male adolescent who's constantly bossed around by his dominant father and sexually harassed by his manipulative stepsister Janis. He runs away from home and drifts off into the big city night life. However, it quickly becomes clear the outside world isn't a much better place to hang around actually, as he successively encounters an elderly pervert in a bar and a bunch of redneck rapists. Bobby eventually ends up with the worst possible circle of friends imaginable: a satanic coven! Although, friends … It seems like Bobby isn't welcome anywhere, not even among devil worshipers. "Satan's Children" is a crazed 70's film stuffed with bizarre and uncomfortable sexual vibes. There are hints of incest, pedophilia and a whole lot of innuendo towards homosexuality and rape. This could be quite the controversial and disturbing masterpiece of exploitation; if it wasn't for the fact the film is so poorly elaborated and pitiable. "Satan's Children" is another one of those out-and-out demented devil-worshiping movies cashing in on the real life-case of Charles Manson and all his followers. You know this type of flicks! Long-haired teenage hippie scum talking to goat head statues and tying down scarcely dressed girls to alters with the intention to sacrifice their virgin blood to Our Lord Satan. This movie never manages to build up an even remotely sinister atmosphere, but it does contain a handful of shocking and downright offensive images; like when a disobedient girl is buried up till her neck in sand before covering her face with a gooey syrup that attack ants. Since there obviously was too little budget to put craftsmanship into the sequences of virginal sacrifices and occult ceremonies, the makers admirably attempted to hold on to the viewers' attention by continuously adding new sub plots, like rivalry and competition within the sect. I just wished the script would follow the idea of its own title and have the cult exist of actual children instead of late teens or punks in their early twenties. Now that would have made the film truly original and special without even requiring the sexual innuendo. Still, any movie that has its teenage protagonist running around for at least three quarters of the play time dressed only in tidy white underpants is maybe awkward enough already. And just when you think the film tends to get a little boring and/or start to wonder where all of it is going, there are a couple of deranged but exciting plot twists and a marvelously twisted climax.

I'm no Satanist but I'm pretty sure of one thing - Satan loves the gays. What better way to bring sin into the world? They're so efficient at it! But, like all other religions, everyone has their own (mis)conception of whatever imaginary friend they worship. In the case of Simon's Satanic cult, they literally just change "God" to "Satan" and leave everything else as is. Thus, the gay is ironically evil. So is unchecked greed and power-grabbing. And gratuitous nudity. And even straight sex seems to be taboo.

Long story short, Satan is a prude and this movie, despite its inadvertent hilarity offers nothing more titilating than the lead actor's bare ass just before he's raped by some rednecks.

I started with this would be just another bad movie moved on to thinking it was an attempt by a Christian church group at showing the evils of drugs sex and homosexuality and how they all lead to satan but then it seemed like a Church is Satan recruitment video for reasons I won't explain, possible spoilers. This is cheese from start to finish bad acting outside the performance of the guy playing the cult leader the dialogue would have been better if the acting talent was up to the job. I'll tell you what, I'm probably going to remember this movie for a very long time because I thought I figured out the point to the movie but was wrong multiple times. I'm obsessed with finding any actual information about who made this and why but other than a brief synopsis on IMDB that showed that this was the lone credit for the entire cast I've found nothing beyond that the "studio" never made another movie and there is no Wikipedia page, the movie is almost a complete mystery.