In the wake of real-life horrors such as the Manson murders and cinematic assaults such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Last House on the Left (1972), regional filmmakers felt empowered to present confrontational and controversial nightmares on screen. One of the most disturbing and creative of these is Satan's Children (1975), a Florida-based production showing the dangers young people faced every day in the 1970s -- dangers like Satanic cults, gang rape, quicksand, and even marijuana.
Of course, some of your universe's reviewers don't understand Satan's Children. For example, reviewer preppy-3 writes, “Basically a boring, stupid and offensive film.” Reviewer gerrymackenzie writes, “The cinematography, sets, wardrobe and hairstyles are as ugly as the underlying message of the film.” And reviewer I_Ailurophile writes, “'Satan's children' is horrible and worthless, and no one should ever watch it.”
[Before we get into the details of the film, a trigger warning is in order, as Satan's Children depicts casual homophobia and disturbing scenes of rape. As a confrontational film about the youth of the 1970s, it pulls only a few of its punches.]
Read on for an exploration of this powerful and controversial film...
After an accomplished title sequence featuring cartoon images of a devil, funky music, and creepy Satanic whispering (not to mention production personnel named Candy and Foxy), the film opens on a Florida swimming pool as a young woman in a bikini lounges in the sun. The young man mowing the lawn, Bobby, ogles her, then pushes the lawn mower close to her, spraying her with grass. After he is finished with his mowing, the woman, Janis, asks him to get her a drink.
“Get screwed,” he says.
“Is that an offer?” she asks with a smirk.
Creepily, Bobby and Janis are revealed to be step-siblings. She goes to his room and sees him in his underwear, so she teases him some more. Later, Bobby and Janis and Janis’s father eat dinner out of styrofoam take-out containers, and Janis teases him sexually some more, pressing her foot into his groin. Subtly, he threatens to poke her foot with a fork, prompting her to reveal he has been hiding a bag of marijuana in his bedroom. Understandably having had enough of his home situation, Bobby runs out the front door. When his stepfather runs outside, Bobby yells, “Go to hell! Go to hell! Go to Jesus! H. Christ Hell!”
Bobby walks alone through the empty night streets of his Florida town. He ends up at a diner, where a middle-aged man attempts to pick him up. A younger man in a tight white t-shirt and motorcycle helmet kicks the middle-aged man out of the diner booth, then sits down across from Bobby, maligning the older man because of his sexuality. Then the younger man hits on Bobby. They ride on the man’s motorcycle to his home, where the man offers Bobby a place to sleep.
In one of the film’s many genuinely disturbing scenes, the man pulls a switchblade on Bobby and rapes him. The man also calls a bunch of his friends who not only rape Bobby in a car but also pour a can of beer in his hair.
The next day, a group of young people led by a woman named Sherry are playing with a ball in a field when they find Bobby, naked and unconscious, in the grass. They bring Bobby to their house, where they hint that Sherry is the second-in-command of a Satanic cult led by someone named Simon, and they worship The Master, who may or may not be Satan himself. When a young man. Joshua, argues that Bobby shouldn’t be part of the group because he’s “a queer,” he tells Sherry, “If you go making sacrifices seeking dispensation for a queer and you’ll bring down Satan’s wrath all right! You’ll unleash all the demons of Hell on this place!”
When Bobby wakes up, he finds himself being fed watery soup in bed while young women stand around the bedroom. “I don’t know what’s going on around here,” he says, understandably. Sherry explains there are 15 people leaving in the commune, and that they do whatever they want to have a good time.
The filmmakers take time to present the politics of the cult, as Joshua prays to The Master to bring Simon back because Sherry is leading the cult down the wrong path, and Sherry has one of the women, Monica, strung up in what appears to be a sacrifice room because Monica has revealed her lesbian feelings.
In another disturbing scene, Sherry has Joshua and two of his followers hanged from poles in the field at night while other cult members chant “Satan! Master! Lucifer!” At the same time, Sherry goes to bed with Bobby, whose legs are paralyzed.
Soon, Simon returns to the cult. Simon is a mustachioed man who smokes cigarillos and wears a brown leather jacket draped over his shoulders. He summons Sherry to breakfast, where she asks, “Did you have a nice trip?”
“Okay, I guess,” he replies. “Did you have a nice hanging?”
She explains that she had Joshua and his followers hanged because he was thwarting his authority. Then, referring to Bobby, she says, “I’m in love.”
Simon replies coldly, “For your sake, I hope he is.” (Presumably, the cult leader is implying that Bobby must be in love with Sherry, and therefore solidly heterosexual, or there will be trouble. The actor playing Simon, Robert C. Ray II, communicates all this subtly, barely raising an eyebrow — or a mustache.)
Simon later tries Monica in his unholy court, asking her, “Have you ever as a follower of Satan entertained in your mind erotic desires homosexual in nature?”
“No,” says Monica.
“Have you ever in your life as a follower of Satan ever made any homosexual advances toward any sister follower of Satan?”
“No,” repeats Monica, but we see blood dribble out of her mouth as she is supernaturally punished. She chokes. (Monica, sadly, is never seen again, so we never learn her fate, which is likely not a positive one.)
In yet another genuinely disturbing sequence, Sherry is buried up to her head in the Florida sand. The Satanists pour bottles of maple syrup on the sand to entice ants.
Simon enters Bobby’s satisfyingly 1970s room and tells him he is in trouble.
Simon says Sherry was wrong about Bobby’s sexuality, but Bobby protests. “She was right, I tell you. I’m willing to give Satan my soul right now.”
Simon laughs. “He doesn’t want it.”
“Why not?”
“You’re weak. You’re a loser. Satan wants winners. A winner is someone who gets what he wants. And you never have.” Simon continues to provoke Bobby. “Poor little boy got raped by some queers and he’s perfectly willing to forget all about it. You must believe in Jesus.”
After Simon leaves, Bobby, who is not actually paralyzed, gets out of bed dressed only in his white underwear and tries to open the window, setting off an alarm. Then he runs into the hallway, where he pushes past two cult members and runs out of the house.
The response to Bobby’s escape reveals the cult has defenses equivalent to the army of a small nation. Simon calls his operatives in the field, telling them where to look for Bobby, and also telling them to electrify the fence surrounding the property.
Dressed only in his briefs, Bobby runs along a river bank and hides in the dirt. Perhaps surprisingly, this works well, despite his pursuers standing a handful of feet away from him.
Thrillingly, Bobby reaches the fence. Director Joe Wiezycki films this sequence like a silent movie, as Bobby looks to his left and we see a man running toward him, then he looks to his right and we see another man running toward him, and then he jumps straight for the fence, which has not yet been electrified. The director cross-cuts to another cult member driving to the rather isolated location where the lever to electrify the fence is mounted on a tree. Bobby jumps over the fence as the electricity is activated, shocking one of Bobby’s pursuers (a violent death heard through sound effects and, fortunately for the audience, not seen onscreen).
During the suspenseful chase, Bobby repeatedly falls to the ground, exhausted, until his pursuers find him and turn him over. In a stunning twist, however, Bobby has collapsed right next to a small crevice filled with that ever-present danger from the 1970s, quicksand!
In Florida, obviously, quicksand is bright white and relatively shallow. However, it quickly takes the life of one of the pursuing cult members, who makes the mistake of lying down in the pool. When his accomplice attempts to rescue him, Bobby taps the man with a stick and the man slips into the quicksand as well.
The film cuts to Bobby’s house, where he has stolen a Jeep and returned. Covered in dirt and still nearly naked, Bobby smashes a bottle over his stepfather’s head. Janis confronts him: “You’re crazy!”
“Go get in bed,” he orders Janis, but before she can move, he pushes her onto the sofa. The film fades to black as he (presumably) rapes his stepsister.
In the final horrific sequence, Bobby drives to the house of his rapist, with Janis tied up in the back of the Jeep. We watch as Bobby, in quick cuts, blows away all his rapists with a shotgun. Then we watch the shadows on the wall as Bobby uses a hacksaw to dismember the rapists.
In the end, Bobby returns to the cult’s property with a trash bag containing the heads of his rapists. He confronts Simon at the breakfast table. “What’s it supposed to mean?” Simon asks.
“That Joshua was wrong,” Bobby says smugly. (Perhaps he means the severed heads prove his heterosexuality, as he was raped by the owners of the heads.) Of course, this means Bobby is allowed to rescue Sherry from her torture and make love to her. As they have sex, the cult rubs blood over Janis, who is graphically crucified by Simon and the other cult members. All the time, a light folk rock song plays on the soundtrack.
The End
At first blush, Satan's Children appears to consist of almost non-stop homophobia, as Bobby's sexuality is questioned by everyone he meets -- everyone except himself. A predatory middle-aged man and a gang of thrill-seeking men prey on Bobby as soon as he leaves home, and even the local Satanic cult won't accept members who cannot prove their staunchly heterosexuality. Are the filmmakers' intentions homophobic? Possibly. Probably. But they do include in their story Monica, a young woman with lesbian desires -- easily the most sympathetic character in the film. And one could argue that cult leader Simon is presented as a gay character despite his blanket disapproval/outlawing of homosexuality. The film could be read as slightly deeper than a cursory viewing would suggest.
In any case, as far as rape/revenge films go, Satan's Children depicts a young man sawing off the heads of his attackers with a hacksaw; why would anyone need anything else?