BAPHOMET * USA 2021 Dir: Matthan Harris. 72 mins
While there’s some pleasure to be found in watching the great Giovanni Lombardo Radice (“John Morghen” to long-term “video nasty” fans) channeling late-period Donald Pleasence in the role of a Satanic cult leader, writer-director Matthan Harris’ California-based spin on 1970s American occult horror movie themes is embarrassingly lame – despite an almost admirable commitment to sincere, straight-faced delivery.
Radice sends one of his cult members (Stephen Brodie) to pressure shouty patriarch Colin Ward into selling his land for reasons unspecified. Ward’s pregnant daughter (a remarkably unsympathetic Rebecca Weaver) subsequently suffers the loss of her husband (Harris) when the Satanists conspire to engineer a fatal shark attack while he’s paddle boarding in Malibu. The signs don’t look good: dead birds on the front porch, rattlesnakes in bed, warnings from the recently dead and an entirely expected miscarriage, while the stubborn, annoying Ward refuses to entertain the chance that the family might be under a diabolical curse.
Feeling over-extended despite a running time around the average length of a typical streaming series episode, this is laughably earnest in its melodramatics. The performances are on the level of a daytime soap opera, which makes for some cheap chuckles when the plot contrives the necessity for Weaver to dig up her maimed, rotting husband for the sake of a ritual. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, an embarrassingly charisma-free Dani Filth shows up to (literally) Skype in his role while Charlotte Bjornbak is equally weak sauce as a white witch / high priestess. There are more frightening / tense episodes of RENT-A-GHOST.
Review by Steven West
BAPHOMET is available on Amazon