Satan’s Slave
Her twentieth birthday approaching, Catherine Yorke is leaving the London flat she shares with her boyfriend to spend a week in the country in the company of her parents, visiting her father’s brother, whom she has not seen since she was a child, but as they approach the mansion tragedy strikes, her father suffering a momentary fit and crashing the car into a tree.
Catherine running to summon help, the car explodes with her parents still inside, taken in by her Uncle Alexander who lives with his son Stephen and his secretary, while her cousin is welcoming, solicitous, Frances is somewhat colder, jealous of the attention given the new arrival who is kept upstairs, coddled but ignored.
A low-budget independent horror originally released in December 1976, Satan’s Slave was directed by Norman J Warren from a script by David McGillivray, the principal locations shot in rural Pirbright in Surrey and starring Candace Glendenning as Catherine, a woman who is sensitive to strange vibrations and fearful that her premonitions will come true but essentially pliant and unquestioning, easily manipulated.
The opening scene that of a Satanic ritual, the master of ceremony concealed behind the mask of a goat, the voice is obviously that of Curse of the Crimson Altar’s Michael Gough, Uncle Alexander, sour-faced and patronising, assuring Catherine the police attended following the fatal crash but despite her being the only witness they don’t need to talk to her urgently, and certainly not before the funeral which will take place in the grounds of the mansion that afternoon.
A film which is entirely dependent on Catherine placidly accepting the situation she is in and the assurances of the strangers around her, despite John (Michael Craze) back home she declares her love for polite imbecile creep Stephen (Martin Potter) whom she has only just met, while scheming jilted Frances (Barbara Kellerman) wants nothing to do with him, but nor will she allow him to ignore her, but she will help the cult deceive and entrap Catherine, at least until she changes her mind and tries to help her escape.
With violence and tacky nudity as clumsy as the script, lines repeated and rephrased and Catherine a kind of pathetic foil for machinations in which she has no function other than her presence, essentially the same Beta Grade role Glendinning would later play on Blake’s 7’s Weapon, Satan’s Slave is as endemically dull as it is preposterous, a film which demands the viewer does as little thinking as the characters.
Satan’s Slave is available on Blu-ray from Indicator
