Sam Panico Satanik isn't a hero, but it is based on an Italian comic book which was part of the fumetti neri (black comics) phase that Danger: Diabolik inspired (which is why Satanik is spelled that way).Marnie Bannister is a biologist and chemist who earned her Ph.D. at a young age. While a technically brilliant scientist, she is ridiculed by her peers because of her poor background the fact that her face is marked by tumors. She still lives at home, Cinderella-style, with two beautiful sisters, an alcoholic father and closed-minded mother - all of whom make fun of her appearance. Working along with the alchemist Masopust, she develops a drug that makes her beautiful. The side effect? It also makes her into a murderous criminal named Satanik, who uses her beauty and sex appeal to take advantage of men. The comic features plenty of horror characters, such as evil ghosts and a vampire named Baron Wurdalak.The movie, however, only concerns itself with Satanik's transformation from old woman to beautiful young woman, playing by Polish model Magda Konopka.If you're looking for this film to live up to Bava's Danger: Diabolik, I have bad news for you. There's no way that can happen. Sure, there are murders and jet-setting and fun music, but this movie crawls while Bava's runs, tumbles and pirouettes.Its director, Piero Vivarelli, is better known for the original Django. With the great poster art and source material, I guess I was just expecting more.

Uriah43 A brilliant scientist by the name of "Professor Greaves" (Nerio Bernardi) has just invented a serum that rejuvenates cells and reverses the aging process. His assistant, "Dr. Marny Bannister" (Magda Konopka) desperately wants the formula due to the fact that she is scarred and ugly. However, Professor Greaves is cautious and wants to do more research before even attempting to try it out on a human being. Dr. Bannister then kills Professor Greaves and ingests the serum which turns her into the young and beautiful woman she always wanted to be. But there are two important factors which Dr. Bannister failed to take into account. First, the formula unleashes savage and primordial desires into whoever takes it. The second factor is that the serum wears off after a period of time and the person reverts back to their previous form. What follows is a murderous rampage by Dr. Bannister who is not averse to using her beauty to further her evil desires. Although it was originally filmed in Italian, the English dubbing was very noticeable. Also quite noticeable was the fact that a scene or two was cut rather abruptly. This gave the film a kind of choppy feel. Still, Magda Konopka looked great and the film had a nice late-60's atmosphere to it. All things considered I give it an average rating.

rwagn Many of the other reviewers cite the suspect quality of this release on Retromedia. I just purchased this title from Sinister Cinema and the print quality is very good. The color is not as vivid as one would prefer but is not washed out in the least. Considering the movie is almost 40 years old the color of the print is really quite fine. The print has no jump cuts or jarring splices, the audio and video are in perfect sync and the print runs a full 84 minutes.My rating is specifically for overall print quality. As with most other reviewers, I found the movie a bit tedious but I'm glad that I watched it and own a copy. Kudos to Sinister Cinema as they are a consistent class act in regards to making hard to find titles available in the best possible presentation. Their Krimi releases are especially outstanding!

Brandt Sponseller There are a lot of misconceptions about this film due to various marketing facts. In a nutshell, Satanik (the title card in the film gives it as "Satanic") is the story of Dr. Marnie Bannister (Magda Konopka), who takes drastic measures to try to get rid of her disfiguring scars. She's pursued as a criminal, and the film is basically an extended cat and mouse game. The cats never get too close until the end, and the film also indulges in various modes that were somewhat stereotypical at the time, including nightclub scenes (some with go-go dancing), playboy/playgirl "romance" subplots (complete with a small amount of gratuitous nudity), and a slight travelogue feel. But at its heart, this is simply a crime/thriller with elements of the police procedural, mystery and sci-fi genres present and a heavy late 1960s/early 1970s vibe. Even though there is a very broad expanse of gray on the border between thrillers and horror films, calling Satanik horror is a stretch that results in breakage.It's not exactly easy to find the relevant background information, but the story seems to be taken from a couple different, perhaps interconnected, sources. In 1964, Italian comic book author Max Bunker (a pseudonym for Luciano Secchi) began a series that initially was called "Killing", although "Satanik" appears as a subtitle on some, if not all of the books, which eventually ran to at least 300 issues. The series, one of many Italian comics ostensibly influenced by or based on the 1911 French comic, Fantômas, featured a male protagonist who would dress up like a skeleton. Later, there was also a French photography-oriented fictional magazine based on Satanik. In that version, Satanik's lover, Dana, appears to have been more heavily emphasized--probably because it allowed sexy photographs of women.Italian director Piero Vivarelli, who later wrote a couple of the Emanuelle films, and producer/scriptwriter Eduardo Manzanos Brochero, took extreme liberties with their source material. There is no male protagonist, and no person dressing up like a skeleton to be found in the film. The consensus is that Satanik was made in the wake of Mario Bava's superb early 1968 film Diabolik (aka "Danger: Diabolik") as an attempt to cash in on its success and recapture its swanky vibe. The transformed Konopka bears some resemblance to Diabolik's Eva Kant (Marisa Mell), although unfortunately Satanik can't come near Diabolik in terms of visual excellence or plot momentum and suspense. Vivarelli and Brochero forgo Diabolik's trumping of James Bond for a grittier Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde theme (which again, might make some viewers think along the lines of horror, but that's the wrong genre to file Satanik under).There are a couple big flaws in Satanik. The first is that we never get to know any of these characters very well, including Dr. Bannister. What kind of doctor is she? What happened to her to disfigure her? There is also a significant lack of character building for the other principal roles--Inspector Trent (Julio Peña) and George Van Donan (Umberto Raho). Van Donan introduces us to a gangster subplot, but this is very inadequately developed. To make things worse, the pacing on a number of scenes is achingly slow--including scenes that we very well know how they'll end, like Dr. Bannister's early encounter with a fellow doctor doing regeneration research.But there are pluses, too. The overall atmosphere is good if you're into genre films of the era and locale. Konopka can come across as very beautiful. The music is enjoyable, fits the atmosphere well, and even the fact that Brochero didn't spring for a full 90 minutes of score ends up helping, because the final effect suggests various musical leitmotifs that we periodically revisit. Most importantly, the story is often suspenseful, despite the lack of fully fleshed-out exposition, and it is almost always interesting, even when it's a bit slow.Retromedia's DVD release of Satanik is unfortunately not in the correct aspect ratio, and like many of their releases, the print quality is a bit rough. There are a couple bad splices, and the color is not very vivid. Still, having a film like Satanik available on a less-than-perfect DVD is better than not having it at all. I'm sure it's not easy to track down pristine prints of these kinds of films, if indeed pristine prints exist. Retromedia is laudable for its efforts to re-release these lesser-known titles on modern media.