Satan's Black Wedding

After writer Nina (Lisa Milano) inexplicably commits suicide, her brother, Hollywood actor Mark Gray (Greg Braddock), tries to find out why, his investigation leading him to an old church where a cult of vampires plan to invoke the devil to preside over an unholy 'black wedding'.

Even with a scant running time of just over an hour, Satan's Black Wedding, from director Nick Millard, is still a real test of endurance, the film being inept in almost every department: the script is crazy bad, amateur actors struggle to keep their plastic joke-shop fangs in place, the blood is obviously bright red paint, the day-for-night shooting still looks like broad daylight, the sound is diabolical (in one scene, the dialogue is almost drowned out by the noise of nearby traffic and passing aircraft), and a pair of rats look embarrassed to be involved (at least the humans had a say in the matter).

While some people clearly enjoy Millard's work for its sheer clumsiness, I can't bring myself to rate it any more than 2/10—the same low rating that I also gave to Millard's previous movie, Crazy Fat Ethel (1975).

Nick Millard's previous film, Criminally Insane, about a fat lady killing anyone who gets between her and her food, was a no-budget classic but this one misses the mark. The atmosphere is creepy enough and there's fang-baring and bloodletting but the film ultimately fails to deliver the hellacious conclusion it hints at. Lead Greg Braddock is so wooden he could be replaced by a bookcase. The scenes where he talks are stultifyingly boring. Ray Myles on the other hand brings a malevolent energy to his role as an undead priest and the film noticeably improves whenever he's on screen. Fans of Andy Milligan might dig the general depravity here but I found it a pretty hard slog.

SATAN'S BLACK WEDDING (1976) is an hour-long American indie vampire flick I found on Youtube streaming in a good quality print. It's a surprisingly brisk little effort that begins with a woman being messily dispatched by a female vampire. Her brother attends her funeral and investigates her death, only to discover that she's not really dead but instead determined to destroy her own family.

Not a huge lot of plot ingredients in this micro-budgeted production, but the story of a defrocked priest engaging in devil worship works quite well. The vampire scenes are liberal on the bloodshed if you're okay with the joke shop fangs, and it's short enough to never outstay its welcome.

I had never heard about the 1976 horror movie "Satan's Black Wedding" from writer and director Nick Millard, but given my fascination with horror cinema, of course I opted to sit down and watch the movie, as I happened to stumble upon the movie by random luck here in 2024. I virtually had no idea what I was in for here, but I didn't really harbor much of any grand expectations to the movie given its age and the fact that I had never heard about it.

The storyline was a rather scrambled mess, as it was lacking an overall red thread to lead the audience through the movie. It felt like director Nick Millard had shot many different scenes independent of one another and sat down to edit it into a cohesive movie. The end result wasn't particularly thrilling.

Needless to say that I wasn't familiar with a single actor or actress on the cast list. Nor were I particularly impressed with what I witnessed, as most of the performances were so wooden and rigid that it looked like a first take for a read for an audition. Some of the performers were seriously lacking talents to deliver a convincing dialogue, and the movie suffered terribly from that.

The blood effects in "Satan's Black Wedding" are insanely poor and laughable, it is brightly colored orange paint and doesn't even remotely resemble blood. And then there were the God awful teeth that the vampire creatures had, they looked like the kind of toy dentures that I had as a child in the early 1980s; it was pretty bad.

The editing in the movie definitely also leaves much to be wished for. The editing was pretty brutal and abrupt, with many scenes just ending by a rough cut and then straight into the next scene. And the music in the movie was equally poorly edited and cut in scenes.

My rating of "Satan's Black Wedding" lands on a very generous two out of ten stars.

Satan's Black Wedding (1975)

** (out of 4)

Mildly entertaining film has a brother investigating his sister's suicide. He eventually tracks down the killers to a church, which is being used by vampires for Satanic rituals. This is a very cheaply made film running just over an hour and while there's nothing too original going on here it does remain interesting throughout. If you don't expect The Exorcist or Rosemary's Baby then you should get a few minor grins out of this film. There's some nice, if cheaply done, gore scenes to keep things moving. Outside of that we get some really hammy performances, which lead to a couple laughs.