Skip to main content

Satanic -- a review

The Scooby Gang never had to deal with this crap!

Satanic is one of those “see, I can act” movies. It’s a movie that features an actor or actress from a long-running TV show who wants to demonstrate that they can do something other than the same part they’ve been playing for years. In this case, it’s Sarah Hyland, the star of this flick who has played Haley Dunphy on the sitcom Modern Family (a series which I have not seen and, to be blunt, don’t really feel the need to see). I’m not bashing Miss Hyland for wanting to try something different--far from it, she’s to be commended for stretching her acting wings. And while I can’t compare her performance here with her work on Modern Family, I liked her performance in Satanic, where she does a superb job at playing the sympathetic “good girl” role in this horror film, sort of like Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween.

If only Satanic was as good as Halloween. Hyland stars as Chloe, who’s on a tour of Los Angles murder sites with her boyfriend David (Steven Kruger), cousin Elise (Clara Mamet) and her boyfriend Seth (Jason Chon) before they hit Coachella (oh, these whacky kids!). The murder sites they chose to visit all have a cult vibe to them, including the infamous site where Sharon Tate and others were killed by Charles Manson’s followers. Bedding down in the hotel room where a woman committed suicide (a fictional cult case created for the film) the kids soon encounter an actual cult in the hills outside of LA. Jinkies!


Oh, c'mon, what could possibly go wrong?

Part of the problem with Satanic is that it takes a while for the story to get rolling, while in the meantime we’re stuck looking at these overwrought narcissists doing extremely stupid things just to serve the thin plot. Chasing after cult members to their secret meeting spot in the deep woods just to see what they’re doing is not just stupid, it’s downright crazy. But that’s exactly what Chloe and her friends do, with their excuse being nothing more than they’re bored. They’re bored? Really? Then they should consider doing something less dangerous than deliberately tangling with cultists, like maybe skydiving.

Even when the story finally gets rolling, about midway (too late) into the film, Satanic winds up being nothing more than a collection of angst-ridden scenes that leads to a predictable ending. The young cast is very good, as is the film’s production values, which makes the most of its locations. But, in the end, Satanic commits the worst crime of most bad horror movies in that it’s not very scary. Fans of Modern Family who want to check this out should brace themselves for violent scenes containing gore. Miss Hyland should keep spreading her wings as an actress, for she has a strong screen presence that I wouldn’t mind seeing in other, better movies. --SF










Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Explorer From Another World

It’s Friday night during the summer in Beutter county, an idyllic farming community in Indiana, and the good folks are settling in for what should be another humdinger of an evening. Until their plans are shattered by the arrival of an Explorer From Another World! This turns out to be an alien (Gemma Sterling) who starts savagely killing people from the moment it disembarks from its flying saucer. Local kids Eddie (Colin McCorquodale), Marybeth (Sage Marchand) and Culpepper (Nolan Gay) are planning on seeing a movie, but it looks like they’ll be battling for the very survival of the human race instead! Explorer From Another World is a wonderfully done throwback to the B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Ably directed by Woody Edwards (who gives himself a small cameo as Hank in the sheriff’s jail cell), the film is forty five minutes long, but manages to tell its torrid but funny story very effectively in the time allotted. And the short running time tracks when you...
Post a Comment
Read more

Presence -- A Review

Presence, the latest film from director Steven Soderbergh ( Sex, Lies and Videotape, Out Of Sight ), is based on his real life experiences with what he believes is a ghost in his own home. Inspired by his spectral roommate, Soderbergh wrote a few pages of a script, which he handed to David Koepp ( Panic Room, Jurassic Park ), who finished it. The film was shot in a house in Crandall, New Jersey, over just eleven days in September 2023 (they received an interim SAG-AFTRA agreement during the strike that year). Soderbergh shot this in the ‘found footage’ style, using only one camera, with himself as the camera operator. The result is that Presence is a haunted house story that is told from the point of view of the ghost. And it’s marvelous. But instead of the typical ’found footage’ movie, which is supposed to be culled together from film or video that is literally found after the fact, we see everything that’s happening in this house through the ‘eye...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cleaner -- a review

In Cleaner Daisy Ridley ( Star Wars: The Force Awakens ) stars as Joanna “Joey” Locke, a window cleaner at a swanky London office building that serves as the headquarters for an energy company. Joey becomes late for work when she’s forced to take her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) to her job with her. Because of her lateness, her nimrod of a manager makes Joey work an hour late, well into the evening. Joey reluctantly keeps cleaning windows of bird splatter in the darkness, but eventually bird droppings wind up being the least of her problems. A team of terrorists arrive at a party that’s being held at the office for the energy company’s share holders. Disguised as performers, the terrorists seize the energy company’s board members as hostages, while knocking everybody else out with gas. Joey, still working on the windows outside, sees all of this and promptly goes into action. Because, as the film has earlier established, Joey is a former Britis...
Post a Comment
Read more