| "Satan Has Returned For Her!" |
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The Devil’s Daughter
DVD/APPROX. 73 MINS/1973/USA PG13+
DVD/APPROX. 73 MINS/1973/USA PG13+
6
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Played like an overly long episode of The Twilight Zone, The Devil’s Daughter is an amusing and entertaining piece of early 70s exploitative tatt.
Not a bad film, just one that was apparently made for TV, which unfortunately, at times, shows.
Dianne is the titular daughter of the Arch-Fiend, but doesn’t know about it. She probably could have lived on for the rest of her life in ignorant bliss,
if it wasn’t for Lilith (Shelley Winters, again brilliant in harpy mode), a barking mad Satanist posing as concerned gal-pal of Dianne’s recently dearly
departed mom, Alice, who dies trying to protect her daughter from her birthright.
Lilith (anyone with a passing knowledge of the occult would get the reference) is a sinister character right from the get-go. A smothering,
repressive figure obviously out to reap Dianne’s soul for her Dark Lord, she has Dianne stay with her after Alice’s funeral, basically forces her to
but do so. She also gives Dianne a ring which belonged to Alice emblazoned with a Satanic symbol Dianne sees on a painting of the Devil in Lilith’s
house. Y’think she’d fuckin’ pay attention… And the insignia keeps reappearing – on Lilith’s cigarettes, on the Poole sisters’ (Lilith’s creepy
neighbours) wind chimes, most tellingly on a rather creepy photo album Dianne finds of herself in Lilith’s house.
Lilith’s reaction to Dianne’s decision to move out is a little extreme to say the least, and should have set alarm bells ringing. Winters never quite
hits the high-water mark here that she did in Poor Pretty Eddie, but she does, as always, portray a mean psycho.
The weirdness continues as Dianne tries to almost unwittingly kill a child via mind control, and then spooks out a horse simply by being there, and
she finally starts to be aware of the strangeness in her life around her. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, to put it mildly. And as for Lilith’s mute
chauffer Mr Howard (played by Dark Shadows star Jonathan Frid), oh brother…why doesn’t she pay attention to his obvious attempts to warn her?
Lilith hosts a party, ostensibly in Dianne’s honour, but more as a reunion of the Satanic cult Alice was part of when Dianne was conceived. At the
point where the throng address Dianne as “Princess of Darkness” you’d think she’d go to the police, but obviously her senses aren’t as finely
attuned as ours. As the cult want Dianne to be part of them, to possibly rule them, the weirdness escalates to a fever pitch.
I don’t want to go much further for fear of spoilers, plot-wise, but basically this is an entertaining flick mining the late 60s/early 70s fashionable
fear of Satanism, a la Rosemary’s Baby. Definitely worth a look, especially for those into horror in the pre-Saw zeitgeist. Story-telling as opposed
to splatter. And the ending is not an easy one to pick, to boot.
The picture quality is that of a DVD rip from an old VHS, but given the story, doesn’t detract from the viewing experience. Ditto the sound quality.
Both are slightly grainy and a bit washed out, if that makes sense.
There are no extras of any kind on this disc. In the digital age this is obviously rather annoying.
Not a bad film, just one that was apparently made for TV, which unfortunately, at times, shows.
Dianne is the titular daughter of the Arch-Fiend, but doesn’t know about it. She probably could have lived on for the rest of her life in ignorant bliss,
if it wasn’t for Lilith (Shelley Winters, again brilliant in harpy mode), a barking mad Satanist posing as concerned gal-pal of Dianne’s recently dearly
departed mom, Alice, who dies trying to protect her daughter from her birthright.
Lilith (anyone with a passing knowledge of the occult would get the reference) is a sinister character right from the get-go. A smothering,
repressive figure obviously out to reap Dianne’s soul for her Dark Lord, she has Dianne stay with her after Alice’s funeral, basically forces her to
but do so. She also gives Dianne a ring which belonged to Alice emblazoned with a Satanic symbol Dianne sees on a painting of the Devil in Lilith’s
house. Y’think she’d fuckin’ pay attention… And the insignia keeps reappearing – on Lilith’s cigarettes, on the Poole sisters’ (Lilith’s creepy
neighbours) wind chimes, most tellingly on a rather creepy photo album Dianne finds of herself in Lilith’s house.
Lilith’s reaction to Dianne’s decision to move out is a little extreme to say the least, and should have set alarm bells ringing. Winters never quite
hits the high-water mark here that she did in Poor Pretty Eddie, but she does, as always, portray a mean psycho.
The weirdness continues as Dianne tries to almost unwittingly kill a child via mind control, and then spooks out a horse simply by being there, and
she finally starts to be aware of the strangeness in her life around her. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, to put it mildly. And as for Lilith’s mute
chauffer Mr Howard (played by Dark Shadows star Jonathan Frid), oh brother…why doesn’t she pay attention to his obvious attempts to warn her?
Lilith hosts a party, ostensibly in Dianne’s honour, but more as a reunion of the Satanic cult Alice was part of when Dianne was conceived. At the
point where the throng address Dianne as “Princess of Darkness” you’d think she’d go to the police, but obviously her senses aren’t as finely
attuned as ours. As the cult want Dianne to be part of them, to possibly rule them, the weirdness escalates to a fever pitch.
I don’t want to go much further for fear of spoilers, plot-wise, but basically this is an entertaining flick mining the late 60s/early 70s fashionable
fear of Satanism, a la Rosemary’s Baby. Definitely worth a look, especially for those into horror in the pre-Saw zeitgeist. Story-telling as opposed
to splatter. And the ending is not an easy one to pick, to boot.
The picture quality is that of a DVD rip from an old VHS, but given the story, doesn’t detract from the viewing experience. Ditto the sound quality.
Both are slightly grainy and a bit washed out, if that makes sense.
There are no extras of any kind on this disc. In the digital age this is obviously rather annoying.
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