Satan's Children

I have seen movies that are ruined by directorial malfeasance, or bad acting, or a terrible script, or an ambition that can’t match ability. But Satan’s Children is beyond all that. If talent could be described as a glass of water, and the lack of talent is glass only partially filled, Satan’s Children is what happens when there is no glass. It is not a lack of talent, it is the absence of it. It isn’t unrealized potential, it is realized nothingness. Everything about this movie defies my ability to explain how bad it is. I will try, but no written word in any language can capture it. The actors feel like random people found at a mall and are performing in exchange for a free Hickory Farms sampler, and their cue cards are at that range of vision where you can make out that letters exist, but not enough to fully identify them. Lines are thrown out in the way a toddler throws a ball. There are awkward pauses in dialogue, sometimes created by the actors staring in silence for unnatural times, and sometimes because the editing is so unbelievably atrocious. The pauses legitimately probably bloat this movie by 5 minutes. Speaking of the editing, I’ve made jokes about editors using slap-chops, or Benihana chefs … I take it all back. This wasn’t edited, because editing is a skill that requires an eye for continuity, flow, scene composition, and the sense of the story. The film for this was put in a bingo hopper and assembled as it was drawn. There are cutaways to things that have no bearing on the moment. Skips in reality, where people are on the left side of the screen walking, and suddenly jump to the right. Two actors can be in the same scene from a scripting perspective, but the editing puts them in alternate dimensions of space/time. A woman’s dialogue is cut off mid-sentence and it never picks up. Which brings me to sound. There is almost no foley work here at all; using natural sound is a bold choice as it is, especially as it feels like the sound was recorded via a tin can and string onto a wax cylinder. But then there’s the bold choice of no score whatsoever. And I don’t mean it’s a minimalist score; I mean NO SCORE. NONE. It’s a rare move, one that can be used to great effect (the episode of Buffy after Joyce dies, for example). Not here. Because the sound is poor, the lack of score highlights the near-total silence and makes you wonder if your TV is broken. I could go on and on. The script, the cinematography, the blocking, the pacing, literally none of it works, even accidentally. Satan’s Children makes movies like The Touch Of Satan, Astro-Zombies, and Birdemic assume new luster; those were terrible pieces of shit undone by incompetence, but there’s an earnestness in their total failure. Movies like Girl In Gold Boots, Manos, and The Room are incoherent and ridiculous, but Satan’s Children is a step beyond. It takes the sheer idiocy and massive talent deficit of those movies and metastasizes it into gross negligence. It isn’t just content to make the wrong choice, or the iconoclastic choice; it takes a fourth option. The one that looks at the guillotine, willfully puts their head in the stock, and says “I have a strong neck”. Oh, I know I’m burying the lede on this one too, but, there was nowhere organic to bring this up. This movie is uncomfortably homophobic. This isn’t some 2022 SJW cancel culture retrospective thing; this movie flat-out demonizes homosexuality. Like, the inciting plot point is the male protagonist getting gang-raped by four guys. And the Satanic cult thinks homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. So, there’s that. It takes what could make this movie a fun, riffable piece of shit and leaves a disgusting stain all over it. It manages to evoke a concept first mentioned in Community: the idea of poop spoiling. Hooptober 2022 movie #9/31