Sunday 7 August 2011

Review #185: 'Satan's Baby Doll' (1982)

The freshly-dead body of Maria (Marina Hedman) lies in the crypt of the Aguilars. The castle's inhabitants stand round her body, glancing nervously and suspiciously at each other. Her daughter Miria (Jacqueline Dupre), starts to struggle with her mother's death, and begins to walk in her sleep, feeling her mother's presence inside of her. Maria's husband Antonio (Aldo Sambrell) is a wealthy tyrant who rules the castles with an iron fist, and when he sees his paraplegic brother Ignazio spying at the naughty nun Sol (Mariangela Giordano) getting up to some sordid antics in her room, he flies off the handle in a jealous rage. Meanwhile, Isidro, fears Satan's power and the control he will have over Maria. When the castle's resident doctor is killed after he tries to take Miria away, it is clear that Satan's power is indeed present, but who is he controlling?

The film finishes around the 1 hour 13 mark. The fact that I felt as if I'd just watched The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy (2001-2003) back-to-back in one 10-hour session speaks volumes about the quality of this Italian supernatural erotic horror. It is basically a half-an-hour film stretched out as far as possible into something that resembles a feature. Apart from the expected bad acting, woeful script, and laughable silliness of it all, which you would almost expect, the film is suicidally boring. As Ignazio stares at the naughty Sol through her bedroom door and she pleasures herself in all her overacting glory, the camera cuts from naked flesh, back to his wide-eyes, back to naked flesh and then back to his eyes, and so on. This lasts for eight whole minutes. It's like Sergio Leone decided to make a low-budget horror with a sprinkling of soft-core porn, and somehow lost all his talent beforehand. Fans of over-the-top soft-core porn will rejoice, but for everyone else, this is pretty risible stuff.


Directed by: Mario Bianchi
Starring: Jacqueline Dupré, Mariangela Giordano, Aldo Sambrell
Country: Italy

Rating: *

Tom Gillespie



La bimba di Satana (1982) on IMDb

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