A pizza delivery girl at the end of her financial rope has to fight for her life – and her tips – when her last order of the night turns out to be high society Satanists in need of a virgin sacrifice.
“Satanic Panic” finds itself in a bit of a quandary: it doesn’t quite know if it wants to be a serious horror film or a comedy horror. The problem is, neither one works. It is very rare that a comedy horror can scare you one minute, then make you laugh out loud the next and sadly, director Chelsea Stardust’s “Satanic Panic” does neither. “Evil Dead II,” for me, has to be the quintessential comedy horror that successfully combines blood, gore and scares with slapstick humor and there are very few movies that can achieve that level of triumph. Even the next chapter in the “Evil Dead” trilogy, “Army of Darkness,” paled in comparison to Part 2 as it relied too heavily on farcical comedy and less on true horror and for many, it is considered the weakest entry in the series. The humor utilized in “Satanic Panic” borders on arduous and instead of making you laugh, you find yourself looking at people being impaled and their heart’s being ripped out and there is a very fine line between dark humor and horror but Ms. Stardust paints herself into a corner whereby the gratuitous violence neither scares nor entertains and your reaction is plain old indifference, not the desired reaction a filmmaker aspires for.
Sam (Hayley Griffith) is starting her new job as a pizza delivery driver at Home Run Pizza when she ends up taking an order to a very posh and swanky side of town. After making her way inside the large gates out front, the man who ordered the pizzas pays her for them but does not include a tip. Upset, Sam leaves but her moped will not start so she tries knocking on the door to see if they can spare some cash for her for a cab. When nobody answers, she goes around the back of the house and enters. She hears the mumbling chatter of people coming from one of the large rooms in the back and makes her way towards the room only to find a crowd of people listening to a beautiful woman dressed in red, Danica Ross (Rebecca Romijn). She excuses her interruption and starts asking people if they could spare some change so she can make her way back to work when Danica stops talking and all eyes fall on Sam. She explains her predicament when suddenly Danica blows a white powdered substance into her face and she passes out. Later, when she wakes up, she is locked inside a room with one of the group’s former members, Samuel (Jerry O’Connell). Sam tries to plan her escape when Samuel tells her they are devil worshippers that require a virginal sacrifice in order to raise the demon Baphomet for Beltane, the Gaelic May Day Festival. He asks her if she is a virgin and shocked, she refuses to answer but he can tell she is. He informs her that he is married to Danica and that they were going to sacrifice their virgin daughter Judi (Ruby Modine) but when Danica found out she recently had sex, she ordered Samuel to kill her but he refused.
When they come for Samuel, Sam manages to escape and runs to a neighbor’s house asking for help. Two women there offer to assist her but she can hear muffled screams coming from upstairs. When she goes to investigate, she discovers a half-naked woman tied to a bed. The two women quickly turn on her and she fights them, eventually killing them both. She unties the woman and learns that she is Judi, Danica and Samuel’s daughter and that the two women who answered the door, were instructed to kill her by Danica herself. Judi and Sam hide out in their neighbors’ house, waiting for daylight but when Judi finds herself in the process of being possessed by spirits, she realizes that her mother and her friends are trying to take her over, using witchcraft spells so they can kill her and retrieve Sam for their ritual sacrifice but the two girls might just have a trick or two up their sleeve!
“Satanic Panic” offers nothing new to the horror genre and even with a talented cast, they can’t save the film from lackluster writing and perfunctory direction. Hayley Griffith and Ruby Modine as our two lead protagonists give it their all, it’s just a pity the rest of the movie doesn’t measure up to their high standards. By the time the end credits begin to roll, you realize that the filmmakers had some pretty amazing locales at their disposal, it’s just a pity the script didn’t fully utilize them to their full potential.
Available on Blu-ray & DVD October 22nd
