Escalofrio! Sacrificial Virgin vs. The Blood of Satan

I first became aware of Satan's Blood via an ad in the "Phantom of the Movies' Videoscope" fanzine. This particular edition of the film is distributed by Mondo Macabro (who released another hard-to-find 70's classic, the excellent Alucarda) and is touted as being the "uncut Euro edition." I was overjoyed to find that Netflix offered the film, and quickly put it on the fast track to the top of the queue. When it arrived, I cracked a Bud, popped up a bag of the "sopping wet with butter" microwave corn, pulled that big, red envelope open and and immediately checked the running time. My theory is that very few films can survive a running time exceeding 90 minutes. At first I thought this was a personal attention span issue, but I've revised that hypothesis. If an unworthy movie starts to stray over the ninety minute mark, I get to thinking about all the other things I could be doing like reading a good book, playing hockey on the Playstation 2, making obscene phone calls to local daycare centers, torturing small animals, those sorts of things.

I've got two good examples of recent films that shattered the ninety minute mark and were completely unworthy of their epic running times. The first is Wedding Crashers, a movie with two very funny guys, Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. It starts off as a nice premise for a Saturday Night Live sketch, and is actually laugh out loud funny for about 40 minutes. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't end after 40 minutes. As the movie soared past the 90 minute mark and seemed no closer to any kind of resolution than it did shortly after the credit sequence, I wandered over to the DVD player, and checked the running time of the film. Two hours and 10 minutes. My thoughts immediately wandered to the box of hamsters in the basement whose eyes I'd been thinking about spraying with Tilex. The same goes for The 40 Year-Old Virgin. Starts out funny, but after riding around on this one-joke pony for 2 hours and 13 minutes, I was ready to dismount and beat the animal to death purely out of boredom and meanness. To be fair, I did subject myself to the "unrated, director's cut" of both of these movies, and in hindsight that seems like a poor decision. I'm personally looking forward to the release of the unrated 2 hour and 35 minute director's cut of Porky's 2: The Next Day, and the 3 hour re-imagining of Ski School.

But, back to Satan's Blood. Director Carlos Puerto's 1977 Satan worhip flick clocks in at just over an hour and twenty minutes. And that's the "uncut Euro edition." Now we're talking. And there's a full frontal nude sacrifice to Satan before the credits roll which seems to have absolutely nothing to do with any of the events that take place after the credits roll. My kind of flick already. Since this is the uncut Euro edition, there must be versions of this where all the gore and nudity is cut out, and that version is probably around eight and a half minutes long. Here's a run-on sentence plot synopsis: An idiotic couple and their dog go for a car ride; get lured to the isolated home of a pair of Satan worshippers by a ridiculous ruse; play around with a real cool Ouija board that tells the chick that she's still in love with her husband's brother; are given drugged Kool aid in wine glasses that makes them extremely horny and forgetful; have an oiled up orgy inside a big pentagram painted on the living room floor; find out their dog has been butchered; miss literally dozens of chances to get the hell out; end up sort of killing the Devil worshippers; go back to their apartment; find out that even their dog is a Satanist; and get stabbed to death and resurrected just in time for a predictable twist ending. All this in a very manageable 82 minutes. Highly recommended, and you can watch the whole thing, go back and check out the lengthy orgy scene and pop a salisbury steak Hungry Man in the microwave and eat it, all in less time than it takes to watch The 40 Year-Old Virgin, which has exactly zero oiled up Satanic orgy scenes. The decision is yours.