Wednesday, October 20, 2021

October Horror Movie Challenge: Satan's Baby Doll (1983)

Satan's Baby Doll (1983)
Tonight's movie is a fairly notorious one that dates back to my VHS days.  I always saw this one in the video store, Prestige Video (long since gone), but it was always checked out.  Years later it became harder and harder to find.  I finally scored a copy this year, though a Region 2 DVD only.  Not a problem!  You don't become a European horror aficionado without some tools at your disposal. 

Does the movie live up to all the hype?  Well...let's see shall we?

Satan's Baby Doll (1983)

There are two versions of this movie.  A horror version and a softcore porn version.  For tonight's review, I am more interested in the horror version.

While the movie looks like a demonic story, it's actually a demonic, or more to the point, diabolic witchcraft story.

Marina Hedman plays the recently dead Maria. While waiting for the reading of her will her husband Antonio (Aldo Sambrell), and children Miria (Jaqueline Dupré) and Ignazio (Alfonso Gaita) explore her old estate along with weird nun Sol (Mariangela Giordano).  

The makeup effects of the dead Maria are all over the place. Sometimes she looks like a rotting corpse other times just dead. I am not counting the times she is walking around as a spirit.  This is an 80s movie, but the make-up effects are closer to the mid-70s.

Maria's spirit begins to possess her young, and formerly innocent, daughter Miria into seducing and killing her former husband (father), son (brother), priest, and Sol. So yeah a little squicky. What is it with demonic possession and incest?  

Maria/Miria goes through her whole family, killing them all. The end was not what I expected, but it was fun. 

Let's address the cover. Satan never really appears in the movie and certainly never like that.  Also our femme fatales, Jaqueline Dupré and Marina Hedman are both blondes.  The cover is obviously geared towards the style of covers popular in the heyday of early 80s fantasy.   The alternate cover is not exactly safe for most social media platforms.

Satan's Baby Doll alt cover

Again, this scene never happens in the film.


2021 October Horror Movie Challenge

October 2021
Viewed: 35
First Time Views: 22

2 comments:

Dick McGee said...

I'm mostly struck by the fact that the poster portrays Satan with webbed hands. I mean, it seems physiologically sound that something with bat wings would have similarly webbed appendages as some kind of evolutionary holdover, but I don't think I've ever seen that done before. Something to consider for RPGs with bat/dragon-winged humanoids, or even the tamer groundbound dragonborn of D&D.

"When the Devil calls, she comes" is one hell of a tag line for the smuttier version, I'll say that much for it.

Timothy S. Brannan said...

When cleaning up the scans I noticed that too and thought it was an odd design choice for Old Scratch here. But hey.

Yeah, that tag line was something else. My wife picked up the DVD case and proclaimed "this looks like a winner!"

For the geek-minded out there (heh) the top image was done on my flatbed scanner, the bottom was done in Google PhotoScan on my phone. Both cleaned up in Photoshop.