It seems I had bought a lot of Norman J. Warren films over the last year and didn’t realize it. Much to my surprise, I put Satan’s Slave in the player, not bothering to look at the box, and his name popped up as director. I grinned because I’m becoming quite the fan of this English cult director. Would this film, his first as it turns out, hold up like the others? The answer, in a very smashing way, was yes.
Catherine (the beautiful Candace Glendenning) is off to the countryside with her parents to visit her uncle Alexander Yorke (Michael Gough) whom she doesn’t know well at all. Alexander is known to be quite peculiar and an oddball, keeping away from the rest of the family. On the way, a terrible accident occurs and Catherine’s parents are killed in a car explosion. She is rushed to the Yorke estate where she finally meets her uncle and her cousin Stephen (Martin Potter). They are a strange family, to say the least. Catherine is fragile, recovering from her loss, living in a mansion with people she hardly knows. To add to this distress, she has psychic visions of human sacrifices, in particular of an ancestor she may be the reincarnation of. In the meanwhile, cousin Stephen plays his psychotic games. We see him murder a woman at the beginning of the film (a brutal and harrowing moment involving a pair of scissors and a nipple) and it is obvious he has fits of murderous rages. Alexander also appears to be the head of a Satanic cult. Like I said, things are going on at the Yorke estate, and these things come to a head when Catherine confronts her family of cruel murder. Is Catherine the reincarnation of a lost relative, or is all of this a series of delusions brought on by the shock of her parent’s deaths?
Warren delivers another dandy film here. There’s plenty of drawing room intrigue, lots of slow, stolid passages of English people talking and walking. But there’s blood, and plenty of it, as well as many naked ladies, all splayed-out on altars and surrounded by robed and mask-wearing Satanists. You get it all in this movie, from the prurient to the lurid to the gothic drama. Watching Michael Gough in satanic garb chewing the scenery is worth the price of admission alone, but you also get a knife to the eye, some vicious mauling on the part of cousin Stephen (let me tell you, he’s insane), and tons of surreal sequences. Satan’s Slave is definitely a winner and goes into my top five non-Hammer English horror films list.
Salacious, voyeuristic, full of nudity and blood, all paced with stuffy British drama in-between, Satan’s Slave has it all. This is exploitation filmmaking at its finest and a truly delightful discovery. Break open a copy and have yourselves a bacchanal.
Three and a Half Stars out of Four