Who’s got the tricks to make a sex machine of all the chicks? Satan! The proof is in The Satanist, as writer/director Zoltan G. Spencer (Terror at Orgy Castle) plops a succubus into suburbia to see what happens. Fornicating, that’s what.
After experiencing a nervous breakdown, a novelist named John (who haltingly narrates the dialogue-free picture) is ordered to temporarily escape city life for a little R&R, yet finds only T&A. Typewriter in tow, John would like to write, but his wife, Mary, feeling frisky in a second-honeymoon way, disrobes and coaxes him to do the same. He does; unfortunately, the reveal of his shaggy back rudely hurls the film into horror territory.
Later, on a leisurely postcoital drive, the couple meets the shapely Shondra (Pat Barrington, Orgy of the Dead), a neighbor who fancies herself a “student of the occult.” She loans a book on ancient sorcery to John, whose perusal of its pages causes him to have erotic dreams of making it with a bosomy blonde while Mary, undisturbed by the mattress motions, sleeps soundly.
Awake, John turns Peeping Tom and watches Shondra rub a Vaseline-like ointment all over a woman’s breasts; Mary witnesses a satanic rite being performed using her hubby’s glasses. Sufficiently weirded out, the spouses agree it’s time to end their friendship with that witchy woman Shondra, but awww, dammit, they promised to attend her party on Sunday! While it seems like an excuse to watch a hoochie-coochie dance and listen to sitar-flavored jazz, the real reason for the soirée is unveiled after the couple unknowingly downs drugged drinks: John is tied up and forced to watch as each male guest takes a turn donning a mask of fertility and, well, spreading his fertilizer. (While supposed to represent a goat, the headgear looks more like a goat with fake eyelashes and Cinnabon pastries on each ear.) The moral of this story: Following the etiquette rules of Emily Post will earn you conscription as the devil’s concubine.
It is important to note what this one-hour wonder is not: porn. All the couplings — and there are many, even before the climactic party resembling a community-theater adaptation of Eyes Wide Shut — are practically chaste by today’s standards, featuring maximum toplessness and a minimum of rolling around. Fabulously sexy as always, Barrington adds color to this black-and-white cheapie. As you might have theorized based upon all of the above — or likely just from the name Zoltan — The Satanist feels like the kind of sexploitation obscurity that served as Something Weird Video’s bread and butter, but oh, my Lord, that’s not butter! —Ed Donovan