I am going to give a lot of Gough(pronounced GUFF) on this film. Not really. Be realistic. What does one really expect with a name like Satan's Slave and starring that master ham - Michael Gough. In Gough's favor - he gives(for him) a rather subtle performance and is the best thing about this film. Unfortunately that doesn't mean terribly much. Satan's Slave is about a girl and her parents going to visit an uncle she has never met. He(Gough) happens to practice the black arts and is working against all odds to bring back his dead wife. In order to do so he needs to sacrifice his niece(never really explained why?) Well, needless to say, he has a devilish time toying with his niece as he awaits the right day and hour for the sacrifice. To fill in the time we see his son fall for the girl. The son - as we see in an opening scene - has issues with women and kills them before sexual intimacy comes. Martin Potter does an eerie job playing this deprived youth. He is effective at seeming quite perverse at moments. The director Norman Warren lacks consistency in what he is trying to convey. He also has little vision as very little really happens in this film. What he does do to add interest is show a lot of needless nudity in scenes fabricated just for that purpose. None of it is particularly erotic or interesting(although the blonde in the flashback sequences has some decidedly distinct features and points of interest). For me the biggest letdown of this film is David McGillivray's tiresome, boring script. He might have made this a bit better if he had done more with some of the characters or at the very least had given Gough's character some more "juice" to his role. Gough - when given free hand or a part with some dimension - can make the most trite interesting. Although he still is the best aspect of this film, he doesn't have many of those special Gough moments like you will see in Horror Hospital, Konga, Horrors of the Black Museum, or Black Zoo(my personal favourite). McGillivray's biggest mistake is the ending that he tries convincing us is original even though we have seen something like it hundreds of times. I knew what was going to happen well before.
Review of Satan's Slave
