Satanic Panic (out on DVD next week from Celebrity Video) is named after the wave of paranoia that swept across the U.S. in the early ’80s, inspired by reports and rumors that adults and children were being kidnapped by devil-worshipping cults and subjected to torturous rituals and sacrifice. It’s a potentially provocative and eerie premise for a filmmaker to build on—but here, writer/director Marc Selz doesn’t really try.
Portions of the movie’s first third have the right idea, beginning in vérité/interview style as a fruity self-confessed Satanist defending his own nonviolent lifestyle is intercut with survivors recounting their ordeals at cultists’ hands. The most evocative material follows, as a man shows the camera around his neighborhood of abandoned, boarded-up homes, the residents all having fled in fear of local satanic activities. Sadly, Selz then goes schlocky, cutting to the same guy hanging naked in a basement,...
Portions of the movie’s first third have the right idea, beginning in vérité/interview style as a fruity self-confessed Satanist defending his own nonviolent lifestyle is intercut with survivors recounting their ordeals at cultists’ hands. The most evocative material follows, as a man shows the camera around his neighborhood of abandoned, boarded-up homes, the residents all having fled in fear of local satanic activities. Sadly, Selz then goes schlocky, cutting to the same guy hanging naked in a basement,...
- 10/9/2009
- by no-reply@fangoria.com (Michael Gingold)
- Fangoria
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