Somewhere in the parched farmlands of early 1970s California, a small group of people got together and said, “Let’s make a horror movie about Satan, eternal youth, and walnuts.” What they produced was The Touch of Satan — a film that, much like Satan’s actual touch, leaves you disoriented, itchy, and filled with deep regret.
This movie is the cinematic equivalent of discovering your oatmeal is haunted. It’s not scary. It’s not even coherent. It’s just there, slowly happening to you, like mild food poisoning or a really boring ghost story told by someone with chronic amnesia.
Plot: Satan, Sandwiches, and Bad Life Choices
We begin with an elderly woman murdering a farmer with the sluggish energy of someone who’s been off her meds since the Great Depression. After stabbing him and setting his barn on fire — because subtlety is for cowards — she staggers home to her wholesome, all-American family, who react to this homicide with all the emotional investment of someone discovering they’re out of decaf.
Enter Jodie (played by Michael Berry), a man on an aimless road trip across America, which in horror movie terms means he’s about five minutes from making the worst decision of his life. He’s “trying to find himself,” which, judging by his beige charisma and shag haircut, means he’s desperately looking for a personality.
He stops by a pond for a sandwich — because no Satanic possession film is complete without deli meats — and meets Melissa (Emby Mellay), a mysterious girl in prairie drag who invites him to her family’s walnut farm. Warning signs appear immediately: Melissa’s parents look like they’ve seen too many goats walk upright, and the elderly woman, now known as Lucinda, wanders around looking like a mashup of Freddy Krueger and your drunk aunt at Thanksgiving.
Naturally, Jodie falls in love. Of course he does. This is a movie where red flags are flown at full mast and taken as mating calls.
As the bodies pile up — and by “pile up,” I mean occasionally flop onto the dirt with little fanfare — Melissa reveals that she’s a 127-year-old witch who sold her soul to Satan to save her sister from being barbecued by 19th-century villagers. It didn’t go well. The sister lived… but became homicidal and more flammable than a Christmas tree in July.
At some point, the deputy gets killed. Melissa and Jodie have sex in the woods, which apparently breaks her Satanic pact. For roughly five minutes. Then she ages like a moldy peach, and Jodie, whose brain has the structural integrity of wet cereal, sells his soul to Satan to save her.
The film ends with the lovers now both contractually obligated to Beelzebub, wandering the Earth like hot hippie Satanists who’ve been tricked into joining a timeshare.
Acting: Dial-Up Performances in a Broadband World
Michael Berry as Jodie delivers his lines like he’s been replaced by a mannequin with a ventriloquist’s license. His romantic chemistry with Emby Mellay could be best described as “two broomsticks gently knocking against each other in the wind.”
Emby Mellay, on the other hand, tries. You can see her trying. She emotes. She pleads. She delivers tortured monologues about being a cursed witch with the intensity of someone who realizes this is not only her debut role but potentially her final one.
The rest of the cast floats through the film like wandering spirits who forgot what they were doing. Lucinda, the elderly killer, gets points for commitment — she looks genuinely disturbed, although that might just be from having to remember any of her dialogue.
Direction & Style: Satanic Sedation
Don Henderson directs with the urgency of a man trapped in molasses. Scenes linger far too long. Conversations about nothing stretch into eternity. Even the murders — which, in a competent horror film, might be shocking or at least not boring — unfold like bad community theater improv.
The cinematography, done by Jordan Cronenweth (who later shot Blade Runner, and honestly deserves a medal for surviving this), captures the dry, dusty atmosphere of Santa Ynez, California, with a kind of budgetary desperation. Every sunset is underexposed. Every nighttime shot looks like someone smeared Vaseline on the lens and whispered, “Good enough.”
There’s a lot of walking. So much walking. Slow, ponderous walks through walnut groves, fields, barns, and philosophical voids. The Touch of Satan has the pacing of a funeral procession on a Tuesday afternoon.
Music: “I Wrote This in a Dark Room with a Banjo”
The score, courtesy of Robert O. Ragland, is the best part of the film — and that’s saying very little. At times, it’s haunting. At others, it sounds like someone fell asleep on a Casio keyboard. The music tries to inject tension where none exists, much like trying to resuscitate a corpse with gentle affirmations and a kazoo.
Themes: Satan, But Make It Boring
There could have been interesting themes here — eternal youth, the cost of love, feminine agency in the face of demonic forces. But instead, we get Satan as a bureaucrat. Hell isn’t fire and brimstone — it’s spending the rest of eternity with Jodie, eating sandwiches, talking about how hard it is to find yourself while your girlfriend is vomiting up fire and exposition.
Final Thoughts: This Film Made Me Root for Satan
The Touch of Satan is not frightening. It’s not sexy. It’s not suspenseful. It’s the kind of movie you put on when you want your houseguests to leave. It was mercifully rescued from complete obscurity when Mystery Science Theater 3000 gave it the roasting it so richly deserved, and honestly, that’s the best way to experience it — with sarcastic robots mocking every dead-eyed line delivery and hilariously slow-paced chase sequence.
Still, it has a weird charm — like watching your uncle try to explain the occult using sock puppets and expired lunch meat. It’s not good. But it’s bad in a way that’s oddly soothing, like a Satanic bedtime story that forgot how to end.
★☆☆☆☆ (1 out of 4 stars)
This is where the fish lives.
(Yes, that’s an actual line from the film. No, I don’t know what it means. And neither did Satan.)
