Paying Tribute to '70s Christian Horror in Satan Hates You

Details

Satan Hates You
Directed by James Felix McKenney
Glass Eye Pix
Opens December 17, ReRun Gastropub Theater

Related Content

• Brains-Before-Blood Horror in Stake Land
  April 20, 2011
• 25 Years of Larry Fessenden
  October 20, 2010
• The Knives Come Out in Culinary Horror Bitter Feast
  October 13, 2010
• WILD HEARTS
  April 13, 2011
• This Week's Voice: Best of NYC, the Fall of TVT Records, Corin Tucker, Kermit Ruffins, and More
  October 20, 2010

More About

• Angus Scrimm
• Larry Fessenden
• Bradford Scobie
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Writer-director James Felix McKenney pays kitschy homage to end-times-obsessed Christian horror movies of the ’70s with Satan Hates You, which is a lot more fun in theory than it is in practice. The story follows the crises of faith of a repressed, unemployed alcoholic, Marc (Don Wood), and a pregnant teenage Jezebel (Christine Spencer’s Wendy) who snorts blow before sex and pops pills afterward. Smoking-jacket-clad, martini-swilling demons (Bradford Scobie and Larry Fessenden) make bids for the two heathens’ souls, while earthly and heavenly missionaries, including horror icon Angus Scrimm, try to set our damned heroes straight. The film’s one-note premise is only as fitfully affecting as watching caricatures hit rock bottom over and over again. (Though conceptually, the film’s a hoot: The very idea of having Scrimm, famous for playing a mute extraterrestrial body snatcher in the Phantasm movies, star as an angelic voice of salvation, is perversely perfect.) McKenney’s abstract visual flair gives the film sufficient polish, as in a rape scene that’s represented through a series of ultra-saturated reddish-orange still images, but Satan Hates You never achieves the total batshit craziness of the films it’s trying to evoke.