Foreign films are a tricky lot to deal with. Often times there are things that are lost in translation, whether it be cultural differences, or just plain mistranslation from language to language. Watch a Japanese movie sometime with the captions and dubbing running at the same time and spot all the differences in the translations, sometimes you almost get two different dialogues. Foreign subject matter is steeped in their culture, things us silly Americans would have no or little knowledge of, thus making some of their films a bit hard to understand. So, oftentimes, I'll give leeway to a foreign film if I don't get it, as long as it is wrapped in a pretty package, i.e.: good acting, production values and things like that. The British get none of these considerations; occasionally, I actually hold their work to a higher standard. They've been doing this acting thing longer than we have, although I think we are about neck-in-neck in the actual film-making department (citation needed). I have previously reviewed a British film I thought very highly of, but I held no reservations going in to this latest film, and you only need to read the title to understand why.
You can write a script too!
I am writing this review after having just watched this movie. I still don't know what the point of it was, other than a chance to have gratuitous violence and nudity on display for an hour and a half. There seems to be a couple of different story threads going on at the same time, but only one of them is fully explored, leaving the more interesting of the two with no explanation, although it is probably easier to fill in the blanks on your own. The main gist of the story is some rocker chick looking for her missing sister that may be involved with some weird sex cult, and has a Jim Rose-esque freak show along for the ride. The sex cult is apparently run by a trio of siblings, a sleazy dude and his two sisters, although the point of the cult seems to be in sexually satisfying the dude...I don't see what the sisters were benefiting from this. Oh, and they have an even loonier dad, who is conducting experiments on the girls that have been drugged into the cult. The results of the experiments seem to be turning the chicks into zombies, which he turns over to the matriarch of the family, who also happens to be chained up in the "lab" the dad is operating out of. You don't know what he is attempting to figure out and they never tell you. He's just doing some Mengele type stuff, I guess. At this point I really didn't care why he was doing what he was doing. Anyway, some blood from one of his experiments gets mixed in with the punch used to drug the sex slaves and, of course, all zombie hell breaks loose.
THE authorities on British zombies.
This movie is a convoluted mess. It's hard to stay focused on any one thing because the film-makers never establish a central theme. Also, the title is false advertising, as there is no Satan in any part of this picture, unless you count the guy who sold his soul to get this made in the first place. It's pretty hard to screw-up a zombie movie, it is a very simple formula: outbreak, death, zombie hordes, survivors, triumph. Sure, the bar may have been set high with "Shaun of the Dead", but that doesn't mean you have to limbo under it. There were a couple of things I did like about this film, namely the gore. I also liked the hat the leader of the freak show is wearing the entire film, as it has the Punisher skull on it. And there are some great boobs in it.
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