directed by fauzi mansur
j. davila enterprises
This picture straight from the Brazilian scrapheap is almost completely incoherent. With less than 15 minutes left, the chief of police exclaims – and not for the first time – “but none of this makes any sense!” He is correct. “Satanic Attraction” rivals Maya with its puzzles about who some characters are and what exactly their role is. (Unlike that headscratcher, however, this one isn’t any fun.) Is that a police boat? Why is the heavily pregnant Reporter always wearing a bikini top? Wait, did they just forget that character’s identity? Who is that guy, and what in the hell is he doing here? Possibly the drollest element of this nonsense is its radio-show narration, part of the convoluted sense of SOCIETAL TERROR and OFFICIAL OUTRAGE that you won’t buy for even a minute. But most amusing is that this picture was filmed in Portuguese in Brazil, and the version I watched was dubbed in English but subtitled in … Portuguese. Which doesn’t appear to agree directly with the dubbed dialogue. Which per the usual doesn’t equal the “drama.”
why did i watch this movie?
Well, I WANTED to watch a different Brazilian picture, Shock, but apparently no subtitles for that one exist. This hot mess was suggested as a fill-in, and rightly so.
should you watch this movie?
I know there’s a lot of fans of bad, bad movies out there … maybe you’re one of them.
highlight and low point
The “police work” in this film is really something. This may be excusable, as the victims’ bodies are never anywhere to be found – though somehow the victims are still identified as such. One such casualty, who naturally is taking a bubble bath, fails to realize that a razor blade has been embedded in her bar of soap.
rating from outer space: D
Oh, Satan’s Slave, where have you been all my life? Sure, I’ve recently watched a movie with that
Basically the equivalent of the wave of American teen-idol horror flicks from the ’90s – except that it would have garnered a PG-13 rating – this Indonesian production features a 17-year-old female lead playing opposite an MTV VJ/pop singer. It’s a fairly typical ghost story, this time based on Malay folklore, involving a female entity whose spirit lives in a tree (in the cemetery next to the boarding house, natch) and is summoned into this world by the intonation of durma, a form of traditional Javanese song poem. In this particular case, the Kuntilanak enters our realm via antique mirrors. An occasional barely seen twitch might startle you, and the first couple times the ghastly spirit enters (or exits, I guess) from the mirror are pretty effective, but in the end, this picture is middling at best. It spawned two sequels, because of course it did, and a 2018 reboot – all from the same director, which may be a new world record.
Wow, to say this is not what I was expecting from this movie might be the understatement of the year, at least in terms of this blog and its content. And while you’d think it would be hard for a horror flick to go wrong with demonic possession, this one manages to do so, repeatedly. No, it’s not without its charms – it’s so relentlessly absurd that it’s actually quite enjoyable, though presumably not as intentioned. Terminally silly, with a wafer-thin plot, Wikipedia claims this movie was granted a “special jury prize” by a Paris film festival, which as near as I can tell appears to be some completely fabricated bullshit. I will grant that the solution/cure for the demonic possession in this story is rather original. 
Isn’t it always rewarding to come across a production in which one literally can see the wires attached to objects in special FX shots? And shouldn’t more remakes or reboots or whatever you want to call them be handled like last year’s 
and the nefarious nature of Darminah, the diabolical agent of a housekeeper, is delightfully broadly drawn. 
Oh, and the soundtrack is terrific, blending elements of musique concrète with the principles of free jazz at times; along with the sounds of haunting and weather events and so forth, it’s a treat. Continuity is sometimes an issue: for instance, when the undead boyfriend Herman first reappears, he has fangs,
but in his later return he does not, although at that point he begins to act vampiric. As alluded, the FX can be facile.
No, Marsha, I did NOT expect that I would be watching a morality play when I dialed up this Scottish/Irish co-production set mainly in a single location, that being a police station or whatever the hell they call it in their peculiar dialect over on the Auld Sod, distinctions further muddled by their brogue so that occasional lines of dialogue flew right past these bewildered and dB-damaged American ears. A morality play this is, however, about the souls of the guilty being claimed by You Know, in this case with the able yet hitherto unsuspecting assistance of a human female, played by The Woman
For those unfamiliar with the Oliver Reed 
Here is where we should begin our disquisition on the ephemeral nature of what constitutes art vis-à-vis garbage, and engage in deep contemplation on the revealed substance and its relation to the Ideal, and how mere imitation or re-creation can only hope to further distance us from the knowledge of this state of perfection. We should, but we won’t, because gore impresario, auteur loon and marketing maven Herschell Gordon Lewis would probably laugh and point at us. His frankly ridiculous tale of catering a Society party with an “authentic Egyptian Feast” as a hopeful means of reviving the goddess Ishtar via cannibalism features some impossibly wooden acting, hilariously half-assed set dressing, excessively expository dialogue, indubitably fake blood, transparently ersatz makeup and FX, rudimentary cinematography, et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera. (And in the midst of life we are in debt, 
This lousy endeavor became an endurance test of sorts, as I could hardly wait for it to finish taking up my valuable time with its lousy acting, unnatural dialogue, odd tempo and beginner’s camerawork. This 
SPACE RATS From Outer Space 