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Film Review: Blood On Satan's Claw

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 September 2 2008 at 04:40:55 AM



“Satanic Terror From Beyond The Grave!”

I can distinctly remember the weekend when my parents went out on the town with friends and left me with my aunt for the night. Couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8 years old. Me on the floor, her on the couch. Flipping through the television and finally stumbling onto Blood on Satan’s Claw.

At the time I had no clue what the name of the movie was, I just knew it was weird. The English landscape and funny accents, the creepy music and half-rotten and deformed skulls dug up in country fields. My aunt read magazines. I kept watching.

And I can remember too, sitting motionless while watching a barely legal Linda Hayden, playing the role of the definitely not-legal Angel Blake, slip out of her tight-fitting white nightgown less than an hour into the film to seduce the Reverend Fallowfield. Me stealthy looking from the screen, back to my aunt, then back to the tube. Thinking to myself with an 8 years old’s (raised Roman Catholic) mixture of awe and guilt: “Seriously, what is wrong with you?” Until she finally, now regretfully, looked up from a copy Good Housekeeping, scooped up the remote and bashfully switched the channel.

Now, I had seen tits on the screen before. I had seen, for instance, Stripes. And Conan. And Heavy Metal. This was different. It wasn’t so much the sexiness at the time, per se (today, I view the movie in a whole new light altogether) but it was everything I knew to be “bad” thrown at me with one gigantic wallop. And we didn’t even get up to the whole gang rape/ritual mutilation/murder scene. It had crossed some threshold of decency that went far beyond all of the Jason’s, Chucky’s, and Freddy’s that everyone warned my older bothers, “Don’t you let him watch that!” But it would be years before I saw the movie again. It had become like some kind of false memory; for a time, I wondered if I had really even seen it.

Although the soundtrack for Blood on Satan's Claw has since been released on both CD and LP by Trunk records, there has been no North American DVD release to date. Anchor Bay UK's R2 edition (2003) is the only official DVD release of the movie and comes complete with shooting stills, poster art and pdf files of the original story, with commentary by director Piers Haggard, star Linda Hayden and writer Robert Wynne-Simmons that is unfortunately marred by inadequate sound levels, leaving both the DVD moderator and Hayden close to inaudible.

Years later, however, the film has lost none of its various charms, striking an able balance between the story's overt blend of violence and eroticism with a certain campiness built into the script's use of period language ("I was so a'fear," "throw'd er in the lake," "you done 'er MURDER!") and country superstition in the form of bonfires and old books filled with representations of Old Scratch himself ("Did not Ralph describe such a countenance?!"). The ending still sucks but for 90 minutes one is caught in the foul drift of composer Mark Wilkinson's constant theme of Diabolus in Musica, floating downward through a corrupt world filled with demented, fiery-eyed blondes, cackling old crones, strange hymns and chilling screams from the woods. The first verse of Slayer's "South of Heaven" acted out in the 17th century.

While happy to have a newly cleaned up edition in my collection, to me the film is practically impervious to age and any flaws in the picture prior to its restoration in fact served to make the images even more disturbing. An accidental jump on my old VHS copy during Angel’s entrance from among the thorn bushes as psychotic priestess of the great black bear-sloth BEH-HEMOTH accents the delirium of her arrival and is still scarier than the type of over-used editing tricks that brought to life Sadako Yamamura.

Yes, child, I’d like to come play your games.

[Todd DePalma]

Piers Haggard
Blood on Satan’s Claw
1971/2003
Anchor Bay


type: reviews    keywords: dvd, satan, film, linda hayden,   

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