SATAN'S PRINCESS
More Satan would've been appreciated

  Man, talk about your shoddily made movies.  Who knew Robert Forster could stoop this low?  Okay, he did almost star in Halloween: H20, but hey, at least he pulled out in time.

Forster stars as a retired cop and no-longer-retired private investigator (a hard-drinking one, natch) who's hired to track down the missing daughter of a friend, a job which he pursues over his family obligations, of course.  Anyway, he finds that it looks like a foxy art aficionado (Lydie Denier) is involved, not to mention that pesky Satan.

Things get pretty funny (no, not intentionally) when this guy's goofy-looking son starts acting like he's possessed; y'know, talking in other people's voices, wearing weird contact lenses, making grabs at the steering wheel, things like that.  He keeps bouncing back and forth between good-kid and bad-kid modes, and by the time this is all (not) resolved, I found myself wondering if maybe shipping the kid off to Maury Povich's boot camp wasn't a bad idea.

For that matter, there's lots of goofy shit in this movie that doesn't look like it was made to inspire a chuckle, but did anyway.  Like when one woman standing in the middle of a road gets run down by a murderous driver.  What, didn't she hear that threatening tire-squeal approaching?  And it was nice to see some kind fella leave a half-full gas can lying around for Forster to fashion a makeshift bomb out of.

Editing here is terrible, like one scene where Forster provokes a guy wielding a broken bottle into a fight, and next we see, he's fighting a different man entirely.  Or another, where he pushes some guy back into the camera, where he stays for a few seconds, and next thing we see he's bent over with his head in a toilet.  Yes, it's those few seconds that make it bad.  At least, for technical achievements, the makeup is pretty good at the end, although I was lucky to see them at all considering the shape this tape was in.

But Forster does acquit himself, even getting a few good lines like what he used to get that guy with the broken bottle to fight him ("And I thought you were holding that thing to compensate for having a small cock.").  I also liked it when, after hearing a woman brag that she's killed over a thousand men in the past five hundred years, he snorts "Two a year?  My barber does better than that."  (other actors are not quite so assisted by the script, with lines like "Anybody that clean is dirty!") Denier is suitably sexy, and spends half her screen time naked (and some of that making out with another naked chick) so I'm not complaining.

I'm making this sound like it's so bad it's good, or something.  It isn't, really; it's just bad.  Avoid, and if you can't, then for the sake of the children, cover your ears for the awful songs by Charlie Brissette.  Oh well, they're better than that "Mambo No. 5" song, I guess.

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