THE FEAST OF SATAN (1971)
aka Las amantes del diablo, Feast of the Devil
Article 3553 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-14-2011
Posting Date: 5-7-2011
Directed by Jose Maria Elorrieta
Featuring Espartaco Santoni, Krista Nell, Teresa Gimpera
Country: Spain / Italy
What it is: Mild devil worship movie

A woman is discovered in a state of near shock and with her hair turned white overnight. The woman is taken to a hospital, but disappears shortly afterwards. The woman’s sister decides to investigate her fate, and links her with a doctor who seems to have supernatural powers.

I have to admit that I found the first half of this movie rather confusing because several of the female characters had the same hair color and little in the way of differentiating physical traits to help me tell them apart; it’s a bit similar to the problems I have with a lot of B movies where all the males where identical suits and hats, and I always swore that if I ever directed a film, I would take special care to make sure that each member of my cast looked different enough from each other so that I wouldn’t cause viewers the same problem. Nevertheless, there were things about this movie that I quite liked; despite the fact that it was dealing with very similar and familiar situations (I don’t know how many movies I’ve seen where someone strikes out on their own to find out what happened to a relative only to run the risk of suffering the same fate), there was some quite interesting character touches that made me hope the movie would really go somewhere different. Unfortunately, the movie never really picks up a good head of steam, and the climax is surprisingly dull. In the end, it’s a movie that promises a lot more horror than it ever delivers.