Perfect for Halloween: The Killing of Satan!

If you're anything like me, you know you need this movie in your life just from the cover.  Now, does the movie actually live up to that picture?  Well actually, surprisingly, pretty much, yes.  Does a guy in jeans contend with a giant snake, a lady who shape-shifts into a killer dog, a zombie and a red devil?  You bet!  This is The Killing of Satan, a 1984 Filipino horror adventure that delivers all of that and plenty more.  Not since Coffin Joe went directly to Hell in This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse has Old Nick come to such vivid on-screen life.  It's a perfect creature feature for Halloween night.

So how to begin explaining this film?  Well, it's a bit like Harry Potter in that our hero, Lando (you'll remember his name by the end of this movie, that's a promise), comes from the average, everyday world.  But he's brought into a different world early on where everybody around him and just about every character we meet from then on is some kind of wizard.  He has to quickly learn to use the magical powers he never knew he had as he fights the bad guys.  See, Lando's uncle is one of the top wizards in his little village, but the evil Prince of Magic and his thugs mortally wound him.  So he has to use the last of his powers to summon Lando from the city to come to his peoples' rescue.  In classic hero's journey-form, Lando refuses the call, but then some other thugs shoot him and his son, and the uncle uses the last of his magical life force to save him, so then he's really obligated to go.

full frontal nudity in all its interlaced glory

So Lando goes to the village and just as he's finding out that his uncle is dead and that he has hidden magical powers, the prince attacks again!  I've just seen the new Dr. Strange with Benedict Cumberbatch, and this is kind of like the low budget Filipino version of that.  Magic spells back and forth, ray beams, gushing winds, and an awesome spinning spell you just have to see for yourself.  This time the prince capture's most of the villages women, who he keeps trapped naked in a cage with magical bars and forces them to do his bidding with some magical neckbands.  Lando and his buddy race off to save them, but before they can reach the prince and his men, they has to face a whole collection of weirdos in their path, including a naked snake man, evil seductresses and a mysterious mute child who can lead them on their way.  I won't spoil the second half, but all that stuff on the poster happens and Lando not only confronts the prince, but works his way up the chain to fight one on one with Satan himself.

If you want overly ambitious 80s special effects, this is your Christmas morning.  Yeah, it's all cheap, horribly dubbed and clearly poorly acted even underneath that dubbing.  But that's just part of the charm.  One of the things that really keeps this film entertaining is that there's always something new.  A cavalcade of monsters and constantly varying special effects.  Sure, sometimes they shoot rotoscoped beams at each other, but other times it's a super-imposed pinwheel or an on-set wind machine blowing people over.  If they'd managed to squeeze in a little stop-motion, this would be a full-blown Harryhausen adventure, always ready to throw you a curve ball.  The film seems somewhat old school and chaste until you hit the scenes of extreme gore and full frontal nudity.  I mean, don't get me wrong, the film's terrible in all the traditional senses - it's the kind of movie my mother can't understand why I would ever want to watch it.  But it's also a kind of wonderful that very few movies can ever begin to live up to.  It could have made a perfect episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (and after the kickstarter, who knows, it still might), but most of those movies, taken without their riffing, are deathly dull.  This one's a blast all on its own.

Unfortunately, The Killing of Satan is pretty much M.I.A. on the home video front.  It's one of those titles desperately in need of a cult label's attention.  But it's not completely unavailable.  There is a grey market DVD from Substance, the same label that brought us that crappy Monster Dog DVD.  And this DVD lives down to those standards of crappiness.  Full screen?  Of course.  Soft and smeary?  Just like melting ice cream.  Sourced from a video tape?  Looks that way.  Seriously interlaced?  Oh yeah!  Buzzing sound?  Check.  Bizarre vertical line of video noise running up the right-hand side of the picture through the entire movie?  Why yes, now that you mention it.

And what about extras?  The director, Efren C. Piñon, has made almost fifty cult and exploitation films, and its writer is an award winning filmmaker who's still in the business to this very day!  The cast and crew is full of successful Filipino actors and effects artists with tons of film and television credits.  Do we get to hear from any of them?  Ha ha ha!  This is a Substance release, there isn't even a trailer.  The only thing we get is a "Gallery" which just consists of still shots taken from the exact same video transfer the main film plays in.  Although, I have to admit, their menu screen is pretty cool.

The devil takes many forms, or at least two, in The Killing of Satan!

Yes, this film is badly in need of an HD restoration, and the good news is: it's possible!  Apparently Drafthouse has been known to screen this natural crowd pleaser on 35mm.  So if just a couple of the right people make the right phone calls, we could conceivably have an amazing looking 2k scan of this film in HD widescreen!  Seriously, this and Spookies, those guys need to get off their butts and put this out on their own label or let somebody like Arrow get hold of it.  But in the meantime, at least there's the Substance.

Beware the Monster Dog

I was just about to pull the trigger on the Monster Dog DVD when I heard the announcement that Scorpion and Kino were teaming up to release a blu-ray. So I waited and - phew! Word got to me just in time, because I would've had to double-dip for this one for sure.

Monster Dog is one of those few remaining 80s horror titles I remember seeing the VHS cover for, but never saw the movie. So I'd finally just gotten around to giving it a shot, and it turned out to be a lot of fun! It's directed by Troll 2's Claudio Fragasso. But if you're looking for another Troll movie, this isn't it. It has some silly moments, granted; but is closer in tone to Fragasso's Zombie 4 or his films with Bruno Mattei. If you something closer to the feel of Troll 2, try his Beyond Darkness, which Scream Factory recently put out.

If you like 80s horror, this is 80s horror in spades. Alice Cooper(!) stars as almost himself, a rock star returning to his small hometown to film a music video. Unfortunately, he hasn't shook his old reputation, which is that he's a creepy kid somehow responsible for a bunch of monster dog killings. And wouldn't you know it? They've started up again just as he's returned. There's a pack of killer dogs, there's a literal monster dog, there's a bunch of shotgun toting rednecks looking to kill the whoever they think might be involved in the dog attacks, there's a crazy, bloody old man running around chasing girls who may or may not be a werewolf, and Alice Cooper seems to be hiding a sinister dark identity himself. Who will be the lord of the dogs?

It's never a dull moment finding out. The film's bloody, has ambitious if not impressive special effects, and is really stylishly shot. Sure, some of the dialogue's hokey, some of the killer dogs just seem happy to see the cameraman, the rock videos inserted into the film are super silly, and Cooper is unfortunately dubbed. But all that just adds to the charm. Mind you, this isn't secretly a really good film. There's a shot after a character gets killed that goes to slow-mo as it pans over the shock friends' faces and you just think, come on, man; you haven't earned any actual emotional attachment between the characters and the audience!  But if you just want entertainment, Monster Dog never stops.

So I've got Kino/Scorpion's brand new blu, and I've borrowed a copy of the DVD I was almost stuck with. The DVD is from 2005, put out by Substance/ Jef Films, and it's a real junker. I just have to show you their cheesy menu [right]! According to Scorpion, it's a bootleg, though it's carried by Netflix and everybody, has a registered UPC, etc; so I don't know. It's probably one of those "we'll just assume it's public domain and not license it"-type releases. But even if it is strictly legal, it might as well be a bootleg, quality-wise.

Substance/ Jef's 2005 DVD top; Kino/ Scorpion's 2016 blu bottom.

About the only thing the DVD has going for it, is that it's open matte so it has extra vertical picture. But the OAR is always preferable, and the blu's 1.66:1 actually adds a little picture to the sides anyway (look at the furthest dog on the right in the second set of shots). So even that's just a bit of curiosity value. The DVD is clearly ripped from video tape and looks terrible. It's soft with little detail and bleeding colors. Then, to make it worse, the DVD interlaces the transfer, so you'd actually be better off watch a VHS tape. Scorpion and Kino's new blu is a revelation after living with that for all these years.

Part of a shot only seen on the new blu.

There's also some confusion about whether this is a longer uncut version of the film or not. A lot of that confusion comes from Jef Films misreporting the running time of their DVD as 81 minutes all over the place. It's actually 83.54, which is a lot closer to the blu-ray's 84:23. Plus the blu has an MGM lion logo at the beginning padding it out a few seconds further. But still, technically, this is a longer cut of the film. It has one extended shot, pictured above. At 15:47, we see the dog lying in the street before the group runs up to it. On the DVD, the shot starts with everyone around the dog. So it's a pretty minimal difference. Apart from that, both versions are the same; there are no bloodier kills or anything. But it's still nice to have that tiny bit of footage restored.

And they score another win in the special features. The DVD naturally had nothing, not even a trailer. Well, except they had a collection of bonus trailers, including some from Den. You know that group Bryan Singer was involved with that was exposed in the documentary An Open Secret? Yeah, them.

But the blu has some really nice stuff. First there's a fairly substantial, 43 minute featurette. It's primarily an interview with Fragasso and a second with his wife/ screenwriter Rosella Drudi (yes, she wrote Troll 2 along with most of his other films as well), but there's also a little from producer Roberto Bessi as well. They've got a lot of good anecdotes and specific memories, so fans of the film should be pleased. Even more exciting is the collection of about fifteen minutes worth of deleted scenes. They're from a tape, so low quality (though still better than the Substance DVD) with foreign subtitles burnt into them, but they're no less illuminating for it. Fragasso laments how the distributor cut the film after he gave it to them, and I have to say, seeing the deleted scenes, I actually think they did him a favor. The film is better how it is. But they're still fun to see as bonus scenes.

There's also a neat collection of trailers, including one that's practically a music video in how it uses a complete Cooper song from the film. And there's a crazy Spanish one, too, with the alternate title Leviatan. Apparently Victoria Vera was a bigger star in Spain at the time, because they play up her involvement much more than Cooper's. There's also a stills gallery, documenting the film's past video covers and posters, and the case has reversible artwork.

If you're a fan of Monster Dog, you're really going to be happy with this release. And if you're not, you might want to give it a second chance, because the blu reveals its qualities in a new light.