goldenarrow-99823 Very odd film.Enjoyable. Trippy. Leisurely (even at 69 minutes) but not even slightly scary. There's something engaging about Maya that I can't quite put my finger on; Perhaps it's the magical influence hanging over her. Perhaps it's her potential to take the army of darkness onwards into the future. Or perhaps it's her amazing bone structure and resemblance to Annette Haven in 'V The Hot One' which I found under my Dad's bed when I was a kid and who formed the basis for many of my teenage fantasies...

Leofwine_draca LEGACY OF SATAN is a typically poor independent US horror flick from the 1970s. It's about a Satanic cult of women who hang around in a creepy old basement wearing gothic dresses. As with many witchcraft-themed films of this era, the plot sees them 'curse' an innocent young woman who is subsequently possessed by the Devil. Her partner becomes disturbed by her new bizarre behaviour and things get more and more weird until the eventual climax. With languid pacing and poor production values, LEGACY OF SATAN is best viewed as a curio alone. The acting is as amateurish as you'd expect from the unknown cast and the attempts at atmosphere-building simply don't work very well. The end result is a film which is difficult to sit through beause it feels so tame, drawn-out, and dull.

BA_Harrison Bored architect turned devil worshipper Arthur (James Procter) lures sexually frustrated housewife Maya (Lisa Christian) into the bosom of a Satanic cult who believe that a union between her and their malevolent leader, Dr. Muldavo (John Francis), is the key to incredible Satanic powers. Maya's hubby George (Paul Barry) has other ideas and, dressed as a jester, uses a magical glowing sword to infect Muldavo's face with a life-sapping omelette.According to another reviewer here on IMDb, Legacy of Satan, directed by Gerard Damiano of Deep Throat fame, is rumoured to have begun life as a hardcore feature, but was trimmed of its explicit sexual content to make it suitable for release as part of a grind-house double-bill; it's not all that hard to believe, the film definitely having the look and feel of a 70s porno—all grainy cinematography, trippy visuals, and lo-fi synth music, with a decadent, sexually charged atmosphere, a nonsensical plot, and an untalented cast of complete unknowns. The film's short running time and choppy editing also go a long way to support the theory.However, if there was ever a XXX version, it has long since vanished into the mists of time, and all we have been left with is this dreadfully boring, shambolic wreck of a film, a Satanic horror with no tension, no scares and very little blood. Clearly Damiano considered himself something of an artist, and did his best to bring a hallucinatory beauty to the film through the use of coloured light and strong shadow, but his handling was way too heavy-handed to be effective, the result being a garish mess as opposed to a stunningly creative piece of cinema. Arlon Ober and Mel Zelniker's experimental electronic score proves to be just as much an assault on the ears as Damiano's visuals are on the eyes.

jaibo Apparently, Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano's only non-XXX film was shot with hardcore sequences, but the distributor decided to cut them out and release the film as a regular Grindhouse horror (it played in a double bill with Andy Milligan's Blood); this goes some way to explaining the film's truncated running time (barely 70 mins), haphazard plotting and naff acting. Yet despite the film's shortcomings, it is worth catching as it makes the case that Damiano was a considerable visual stylist, a fine editor and an auteur in possession of a somewhat depressing worldview which runs through much of his work.Legacy of Satan tells the story of a sexually repressed housewife who is targeted by a group of Satanists, who worship a Satan called Rakeesh; the louche bunch of wealthy degenerates put the voodoo on her, and soon she's lying in her previously frigid marital bed with her snatch burning up the sheets. A friend, who happens to be a member of the sect, invites her and her husband to a fancy dress party at the Satanists' pad, and our heroine is inducted into a world of wickedness. The husband, dressed as Harlequin, attempts to save her with what looks to be a light sabre (did Lucas see this?!) but wifey by this time has gone over to the dark side, and colludes in hubby's bumping off. Yet the wages of sin is death, in this case a disfiguring skin cancer which melts the face of the head Satanist and finally infects our lady heroine.The idea that repressed white-bread ladies harbour devilish lusts inside them was explored more fully, and effectively, in Damiano's The Devil in Miss Jones; as in that film, the heroine is punished for her transgressions but we're not left feeling that good has triumphed, just that the end of sexual freedom is exhaustion and, in this case, disease. There's something of a prophecy of AIDS in the skin cancer, which makes Damiano not just the pusher but the Jeremiah of 70s decadence.In terms of the film's look, the director and his cinematographer do a fine job on a limited budget – the shots are effectively composed, with a fine use of bleeding psychedelic colours and atmospheric lighting. There's a particularly hallucinatory sequence where the heroine runs through the mansion which has an Alice in Wonderland, or rather Middleton's Through the Looking Glass, feel about it. Best of all is the relentless electronic score by Arlon Ober and Mel Zelniker, at times mere spooky clichés but at others reaching almost Throbbing Gristle-like proportions of intensity. Damiano, unfortunately, writes pretty wretched dialogue then lumbers himself with actors who deliver his lines like a school play – but Legacy of Satan is, especially for the first 50 minutes, a weird and intense experience with a genuinely malevolent air; it feels like it's been somewhere near Satan, which is some kind of achievement I suppose.If you have the DVD which is part of the Blood Bath 2 collection and are watching on a widecreen TV, zoom in and watch it in 16:9, as Damiano clearly shot it on 16mm expecting it to be blown up and cropped, and it's an open matte print used on the DVD; Damiano's framing in this ratio never looks less than intriguing.