Touch Of Satan (Night Of The Demon)
Touch Of Satan aka Night Of The Demon (1972) Rewatch: ✅
Sadly nothing to do with my favourite interpretation of Casting The Runes (“it’s in the trees, it’s coming!”) but Touch Of Satan does open with someone getting killed in a barn and moments later, someone’s nan crashes through a window … into a house, not out. That’s not a bad start to any film. Usually nans in films go the other way.
And it certainly sets the tone for the rest of the film. There is no way this is going to be anything especially ordinary with that kind of opening and sure enough, it is balmy. The cheesy opening theme that goes on a little too long and runs out of reasonable variations and veers into “err, what other instruments have I got around here?” territory is the stuff of TV movie hell and I love it. I’m in, you know? It’s got me.
Considering how naff the script is, how silly the story is, it’s pleasantly surprising that the acting is somehow better than you’d expect too. I’m not saying it’s an Olivier performance here or anything but it avoids a lot of the pitfalls of late sixties, early seventies low budget flicks. Well. Some of them, anyway.
Anyway! It all gets very silly, very fast. Someone points at a pond and says “this is where the fish lives” just before romance blossoms. Not the best chat up line but it seems to work here. There’s an absolute load of witchy stuff, the window crashing nan has a bit of a thing for doing murders and there’s a satanic pact that probably wasn’t the best move to sign up to but you know what people are like, always getting themselves into easily avoided situations.
It’s completely all over the shop, sometimes TV movie, sometimes giving some lower budget exploitation flicks some competition and all incredibly of it’s time. And it’s totally the sort of film that had it been made ten and a bit years later, would have probably had a rubber Satan and so much dry ice and got pitched entirely at home video. As it is, you have to make do with the latex nan face but that’s okay! It’s the early seventies, they’ll get there in the end.
Ropey, really. But enjoyable in a completely nonsensical kind of way. One I do enjoy revisiting, albeit occasionally.