Daughters of Satan

Vic Diaz was so good in The Big Bird Cage that I just had to see him again to see if he was as funny in all his films. He was in 112 films and is considered the jolly evil fat man of Filipino exploitation cinema. It may take a while to track them all down.

As a bonus, this is Tom Selleck's (Magnum P.I., Blue Bloods, Jesse Stone series) third film. He even has a mustache then.

Jim (Selleck) finds a painting of a witch burning, and the with looks like a dead ringer for his wife Chris (Barra Grant). Suspicious things start occurring. She blurts out the exact date of the burning, and a dog in the painting disappears after she sees it for real. Things just get stranger from there.

It's all about revenge for a 16th century crime. Very interesting.

A very rarely seen little oddity this but I like it. The unusual location of the Philippines is pleasing and there a couple of very creepy sequences. The Robertsons seem positively crazy about each other which is a sure sign she'll end up doing very nasty things to him, but they were both quite believeable and the supporting cast were all adequate. The painting that is the centre of the whole mystery is very chilling, especially in the scenes where Jim meets the new housekeeper and then glances at the picture and sees her in it. The death of the Doctor is very eerie but best of all has to be the very simple scene of Chris lying in bed and hearing a voice in the night calling out "Christina..." Very creepy especially if you are watching this movie for the first time on late night television and wonder if the sound is on the screen or not! There is also an extraordinary sequence where Jim sees movement outside the house at night and investigates only to be attacked. When he returns to the house the incident is almost forgotten in his bemusement..just like a sort of "was it a dream?" sleepy kind of unreality. My main reason for liking this movie is that compared to what Hammer were churning out it is different and scary, unlike most of Hammer's films, and doesn't need to rely on gore. It also predates The Omen and The Exorcist and yet deals with the subject matter intelligently, so in a sense it is ahead of it's time. Good stuff...not exactly the greatest movie ever made but effective and successful in its clearly limited ambitions.

Low budget shot-in-the-Phillipines quickie has Tom Selleck being pursued by his suddenly homocidal wife and two other women. Seems that Tom is the descendant of a Spanish Inquisition witch hunter who burned a certain trio of accused women to death and was cursed by the dying women that their spirits would kill all of his descendants. The spirits have possessed the wife and two other women(an American jet-setter and and RN from Manila)to do the deed. Enjoyable pap with future MAGNUM PI star, directed by Hollingsworth Morse, who usually directed TV shows like FAMILY AFFAIR and H.R. PUFNSTUF!It's a long, long way from Living Island!

Early Tom Selleck film where he and his wife encounter a coven of witches. The coven think that Selleck's wife is a reincarnated witch from a painting. It is always good to see the great character actor Vic Diaz but even he can't help with the fact that the material here just isn't that compelling. Some good exploitation like when Barra Grant as his wife is strapped down naked and whipped. But there are too many slow scenes that drag on agonizingly and I think the film could have been boosted with more shots of the exotic Philippine locale. Not terrible but story needed some sort of adrenaline shot somewhere in the middle.

After buying a strange painting at a sale, a man begins to suspect something sinister is occurring after noticing his wife's resemblance to a figure in the painting and comes to realize that a coven of witches are involved and tries to stop them before he becomes a victim of their wrath.

This was an admittedly fun witchcraft movie, though it does has a few minor areas of improvement to really work itself out of it's overall hum-drum feel. That's the main fault of the pacing in this one feeling just so dreary that nothing really exciting happens, with everyone tending to talk about the proceedings since the film plays it off as a mystery about painting and the reincarnation which can be fun but overall it tends to just drag the pace out. That said, the mystery angle here is actually inviting due to being a rather creepy mystery surrounding the painting, the few action scenes are rather well-done and it's certainly got enough horror elements to keep it enjoyable. Plus, any film that opens with topless female whipping definitely has it's head in the right direction. Overall, not bad but has some problems.

Rated R: Violence, Language and Nudity.