"The Blood on Satan's Claw" (a.k.a. "Satan's Skin") is about as fun and pleasing as dragging an old 17th century wagon up a hill covered in mud and then stumbling upon remains of a maggot infested head. Coincidentally, this movie opens with someone dragging a wagon up a hill covered in mud, and it does take place in the 17th century. And hey, what do you know, he stumbles upon the skeletal remains of a head, yet the eyeball in still very fresh looking for some reason. Point being, "The Blood on Stan's Claw" is neither fun nor pleasing.
This is an auto-pilot, by the numbers 1970 witchcraft horror film that is light on the witches and light on the craft. It's a dark and murky looking film (unintentionally I assume since there are only a few scenes that actually take place in the dark) and looks like something that was taped off the Hallmark Channel in the early 80s, which makes the few scenes of blood and nudity all the more humorous.
After the head in the mud is discovered, as well as a furry claw that the children like to play with in church, a local judged tries to investigate. He is the kind of character who is seen as sort of a hero in this film for bringing an end to the evil that takes place in this village, yet he has the same prudish personality of a character who would be first in line to burn an innocent 7 year old girl for being a witch.
Supposedly, evil is going through this small community, but no one really knows why, and the movie is so boring and monotonous and anti-climatic that I honestly don't really care, but I'll still take the time and effort here to humorously complain about it. In the opening scenes, one of the young lads is engaged to a woman. Since they are not yet married and she has nowhere else to stay, the mother of the groom to be decides to put the girl up in the attic. Interesting choice. I guess the crawlspace was already occupied. Anyway, the girl sees something in the attic, she screams for several minutes, but we don't know why, since all we see is the mother and her son trying to beak open the door. Once the mother gets inside, she starts slapping the girl, but the mother is then mysteriously scratched all over her face. She assumes the girl is possessed. The nut house takes the girl away, but a close up reveals that the girl's hand has grown fur and wolverine claws. Amazing that we are the only ones who noticed that. Too bad the other people in the movie couldn't have seen that close up or they would have detected the evil earlier.
The townspeople start to grow a little leery of the children once they begin to skip church (so that's why everyone was leery of me during my childhood) and some of the skeptical children are murdered during sacrificial ceremonies all done by, you guess it, the evil children. They are all lead by a girl who looks like Marcia Brady only with Brooke Shields eyebrows. Her name is Angel, which right away shows the originality of the writers. “Let’s name the devil child Angel. Ironic, I say!” She seduces the priest in one scene that way we definitely know she is evil, since she appears nude in the 17th Century. She frames the priest for the murders of the children (a cover up which lasts a whole 10 seconds), but her main goal is to assemble all the other children for a ceremony in which the devil will be risen.
All the children have little hairy patches somewhere on their skin which I suppose means they are the chosen ones. I'm not really sure why the devil would have chosen little kids to commencer his arrival on earth. You'd think it would be someone, you know, strong and who could physically fight back against those trying to stop them. Lets just say the final battle between good and evil in the end lasts about as long as a 40 year old losing his virginity. The kids really have no supernatural powers, they just lure the innocent ones to be murdered (who happens a whole twice) and scream and chant and are furry. That's nothing. I dated a girl once who didn't shave her legs at one point, and there was always a week during each month where she was a complete witch. She was a lot scarier than anything that happens in "The Blood on Satan's Claw." Oddly, I was the one who broke up with her. I should have broken up with this movie halfway through.
Just watching this movie makes you really depressed for the filmmakers. There is absolutely no indication that anyone involved in this film actually liked what they were doing. The camera doesn't really move around a whole lot, and the ending comes so quickly that you just get the sense that they, as well as us, just wanted it to be over with in as quickly of a finish as possible. Personally I was hoping for a big showdown like the ending of "Warning: Children at Play," anything to bring some gruesome humor, since they obviously weren’t interested in horror. (You know how the Michael Myers mask was altered from a Shatner mask? Satan's costume in this seems to be altered from a monkey suit). The actors sleepwalk their way through the whole thing. Patrick Wymark plays the typical judge of purity, and Linda Hayden's performance in this could have been effective (to be fair, it isn't awful) but she acts no different than any other witch child from a coven Hammer horror film. Completely unoriginal. It has about as many new ideas as a canceled UPN TV series. The movie is so dead inside that it makes “Alucarda" look like "The Devils." Can we expect anything else though from the director who brought us “The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu”?
It also reminds me of how I should always think twice about renting an old horror movie that has no pictures on the back of the box. What are they hiding? I was kind of fooled by this one because of the jackass critical quote that read “You’ve Been Warned!” One shouldn’t warn me against horror movies. I am too curious. Then, of course, I stopped being mad at that critic, because technically, in this here review, I am saying “You’ve Been Warned.” But, I still rent the pictureless 80s box cover movies, and that is because "The Evil Dead" had no pictures on the back of its old 80s box. There has to be at least 2 great old horror movies with pictureless boxes. If there's absolutely any compliment that I could give to this film, it's that it made me feel a little young inside when the Executive Producer was credited as Dick Bush in very big letters. I know I'm only 22, but I felt like an 11 year old all over again.
There’s nothing else I can really say to make "The Blood on Satan's Claw" any less of a failure than it already is. It fails at giving us any scares whatsoever (the music in the movie seems to come from a kindergarten class xylophone), it fails at any mysterious qualities (it freely explains everything to us in the first half hour), and it fails at being creepy by showing two twin girls saying "come and play with us" (in this movie they're not even twins and they are WAY off key!). The transition to video was very harsh on this film. Many frames of the movie are missing, but not enough frames for me. When I see a movie about Satanism and witchcraft, I want the blood to be wet, thick, and dripping right off of Satan's claws. Here the blood, like the movie, is all dried up and rusty.
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