Daughters of Satan (1972)

While poking around in the antiquities shop of one Mr Ching (Vic Diaz), whom we already know as a Satanist thanks to a prologue that’s supposed to get a bit of the mandatory sleaze and nudity in early, art expert and writer James Robertson (Tom Selleck, already looking exactly like Tom Selleck in the 80s) stumbles upon a curious painting of a witch burning that took place in Manila in the 1590s. “Curious”, because the middle witch looks exactly (or really, kinda-sorta if you’re not a character in the movie), like James’s wife Chris (Barra Grant). So obviously, James buys it, hoping that Chris is going to get a kick out of it, one supposes.

However, she’s not at all pleased with the thing, showing revulsion and a strange sense of dread when laying eyes on it. With the painting come strange occurrences: voices calling Chris’s name on the wind at night; the appearance of a big dog named Nikodemus that takes to Chris totally but wants to murder James; and a housekeeper (Paraluman) answering an ad nobody put in the paper, bullying her way into the house. And why, doesn’t she look exactly like another of the witches on the painting!

Pressured by the housekeeper and a secret Satanic witch cult, Chris falls increasingly under the spell of the painting and her older witch self, and soon, she finds herself pressed to kill James. He, for his part, begins to realize some of what’s going on, but most of his counteractions seem ill-advised, awkward and doomed to failure.

Daughters of Satan is yet another of the incalculable number of US/Filipino co-productions shot with predominantly local crews in the Philippines. It is directed by Hollingsworth Morse, who was mostly a TV director apparently specialized in family and children’s TV (there’s a lot of “Lassie” on his CV). Morse never feels terribly comfortable doing horror stuff, so quite a few theoretically cool and spooky little moments here are sabotaged by awkward or simply bland direction. I’d also bet the two Satanic witch get-togethers were filmed by somebody else, because they are not just a bit on the tasteless side and sleazy, but are also much more ruthless and effective than the rest of a film that otherwise can’t even make a proper 70s downer ending feel impactful.

Some of the film’s problems, however, are less Morse’s fault than that of a script that has ideas for a handful of pretty cool moments of supernatural menace but can’t make its characters interesting. James is as bland as every Selleck character, but Chris is written as such a spineless wet blanket it’s difficult to actually see the fight between her and the outside influence that’s supposed to be going on here and not just her spinelessly wavering towards the opinion of the person she spoke with last. It’s, alas, not atypical for a female character in a 70s horror movie, but in a film that should be all about her internal struggle, this sort of thing is particularly destructive. It doesn’t help that Grant’s performance mostly consists of her making bug eyes as Chris’s main emotional reaction to everything.


Still, the film isn’t completely without its charms: the Philippines always make for a good looking backdrop, and there are at least a couple of scenes (the vision that happens to Chris’s psychiatrist before his death comes to mind) where the basic idea of a scene beats the bland execution.