Upon the death of her rich uncle, Elizabeth (Erna Schurer, Strip Nude for Your Killer) travels to his castle for the reading of his will. With her fiancé (Roland Carey, The Diamond Connection) in tow, she learns she is the sole beneficiary of his estate, castle included! It’s such an incredible piece of property, if you can pay no mind to the still-in-use torture dungeon or the insane woman in one of the bedrooms.
In the two-day wait for paperwork processing, some locals tell Liz her uncle was planning to sell the place, which is news to her. Others are pushier, needling her about taking it off her hands. At any rate, the requisite strange things begin to occur, from nocturnal visions and a tree bursting through the bedroom window (13 years before Poltergeist) to, yep, that old chestnut known as first-degree murder.
A good reason exists for Satan’s Doll being obscure: so is its writer and director, Ferruccio Casapinta, whose filmography starts and ends here. Despite its nasty-sounding title (no doubt made nastier if confused with an X-rated film from 1982 with almost the same name), the movie is rather cheerful in its coloring and overall harmless — a minor giallo more Scooby-Doo than Sergio Martino. Instantly forgettable, this Doll contains enough of the “old dark house” trappings to interest viewers, even if the mystery at its core is hardly the stuff of Agatha Christie. —Rod Lott