day 3

Wicked Women Double Feature!

DAUGHTERS OF SATAN
(1972)

Magnum vs. the Witches!

The movie opens with a strange scene where a woman in a super-villain costume whips a half-naked Phillipina who is hanging in an awkward position over a series of jagged spikes. The super-villain demands the half-naked chick to recite the names of the seven lords of hell, or something like that. From this intro, you know you're in for a cheap, thrilling, absolutely ludicrous good time.

A young Tom Selleck (already sporting that mustache and teeming chest hair) plays an art appraiser who lives in Manila (!) and stumbles on a "terrible" painting that depicts three witches being burned at the stake. Of course, one of the witches resembles his wife and, before you can snap your fingers, the wifey starts acting weird, trying to kill old Tom at every opportunity. It turns out that Tom is the descendant of the man who originally put those witches to death and they come back, every generation, to murder the next descendant in Tom's bloodline. Will Tom Selleck survive all the attacks, including suffocation gas?

I'm not telling, but this film is full of great times and I really liked it, from the "special" effects (which mostly consists of shimmering screens and dissolves) right down to the acting and the script. When a native Phillipino calls Tom Selleck a "white monkey" and to get off his island, you know you've stumbled on gold.

Really, this is just a made for TV movie kind of flick with a couple of bare breasts thrown in to make it "edgy." If you want some good, dumb fun and get a peak at a young Magnum P.I., you could do no worse.


ORPHAN
(2009)

Yeah, I'm late to this game. First off, when this came out, I groaned and rolled my eyes. The last thing I wanted to see was another stupid killer kid/bad seed movie. But it was on and I said, ah, what the hell.

What the hell, indeed.

You know the deal: sad yuppie couple with two kids already but pining for a third that was lost due to miscarriage decides to adopt another kid who turns out to be stark-raving evil. Hi-jinks ensue, including imperiling both the other kids and some weird sexual tension between the dad and the new kid. And then comes the twist.

I can't say this was a bad movie, and good on them for making the film they wanted to. And yeah, there's some cool suspense moments, but mostly, I thought it was kind of lame and useless and then there was the twist in the end, which I won't spoil but you probably know anyway.

In the end, my reaction was the same as my initial feeling about the trailers for the movie: I groaned and rolled my eyes.