Let’s just get this out of the way: The most memorable thing about Lucifer’s Women is that four years later, Al Adamson hacked it into Doctor Dracula. The runner-up: It’s edited by David Webb Peoples, future screenwriter of Blade Runner and 12 Monkeys.
Now we return to Lucifer’s Women, already in progress: Professor Wainwright (Larry Hankin, Billy Madison) not only has written about a book about the second coming of Svengali, but believes he is just that, down to claiming psychic powers of control and having the appropriately ratty, assured-to-reek beard — so pointed it looks pilfered from the Pistachio Disguisey disguise kit.
The narcissism is catching. Also believing himself to be a reincarnation is his publisher, Phillips (single-hitter Norman Pierce), who needs “a pure soul” for an upcoming black mass so he can ensure an all-new possession. He convinces Wainwright to procure that meat for him, complete with awfully specific instructions: She must be killed at the point of orgasm, precisely at midnight, on her 21st birthday.
Seriously? I can’t even get my own wife to slip on a pair of going-out shoes with 45 minutes’ advance notice. But Svengali 2.0 accepts all these conditions, like “No problemo!” His target is the naive Trilby (Jane Brunel-Cohen, whose only other role is in Freebie and the Bean), who somehow fits the “pure soul” portion of the bill despite being a stripper and freein’ her bean while reading underground sex comix at night.
As the fated, er, stroke of midnight approaches, both men cough and wheeze, making the movie all the more disgusting than its drab, gauzy brownness already does a bang-up job of doing. It all, um, climaxes with horned-goat-head rape at that satanic crucifixion as scheduled. Weird, right?
Even before that, Lucifer’s Women is overloaded with weird as director and co-writer Paul Aratow — later the producer of outdated comic-strip pics Sheena and The Spirit (the good, made-for-TV one) — dishes out a mute magician named Bobo, a butterfly girl, lines and lines of cocaine, the professor leaping spectral planes and a menage a trois a single thrust from becoming porno — especially since the tripod of that triumvirate is played by XXX star Paul Thomas (Ready, Willing and Anal).
And it’s all really, really boring. What can I say? The devil made me do it. —Rod Lott