Satan's Black Wedding

"Satan's Black Wedding" is in no way a good movie. But, It isn't all that bad of a no budget film. Sure, there are many grade B through Z horror films that are good and bad, but this one is actually entertaining in a strange sort of way. Don't Expect "The Omen" or "Rosemary's Baby" with this one, but check it out if you can find it.

The storyline isn't anything to original as it starts with a woman slitting her wrists and bleeding to death. Go ahead a few days and we are at her funeral with her brother and few others. Her brother, whom is a Hollywood actor, decides to check out the place in which she did herself in. When he gets there he discovers that the police scene hasn't been changed and that there is blood all over the place. The police detective doesn't believe this to be a suicide thus starting the brothers search for what actually happened, leading him into a dark world of vampires with silly looking teeth.

First I should say that the special effects are definitely grade Z. No gore but an extreme amount of blood. The vampire teeth are just hilarious as they look like something that you could buy from Wal-Mart. The movie did have some nice atmosphere with a halfway decent soundtrack minus a few moments where the pitch got way to high and it hurt my ears. The acting was also silly going from mediocre to just plain bad. Especially during a love scene that is about as boring as watching the grass grow. Last, but not least, check out the very end of the movie at the "The End" screen and listen to the music fade off horribly. It was just hilarious.

I got to recommend this to anyone that loves 70's low budget cinema. Definitely worth the time. 7/10

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.

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).

This is an obscure little low-budget exploitation flick from the mid-70's. Just how obscure are we talking? Well, this review will be number six here at IMDb. Only three actors are being credited for this movie, if the cast list is any indication. This flick is so unheard of that nobody involved with it even bothered to track down the five or six other actors that appear in this movie. That's saying quite a lot, really. I personally acquired this on a triple-movie DVD set along with two other Nick Millard movies, CRIMINALLY INSANE and its sequel. I have no idea what the other options are in terms of availability for SATAN'S BLACK WEDDING.

This movie was released during a time when horror often dealt with Satanism and the rise of the devil himself. It very much rides the coattails of popularity from similarly-themed movies such as ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE EXORCIST and even lesser-known titles from the drive-in movie circuit. SATAN'S BLACK WEDDING was definitely a bandwagon-jumper, and not an especially good one, at that.

First, the good things about this movie: as other reviews have mentioned, the atmosphere is very dark and spooky, in a way unseen in later horror films. The opening shots of a Goya painting, coupled with creepy, off-kilter piano music, certainly set the stage for a genuinely disturbing movie. The score for this movie was very well placed, as were many of the sets and locations.

On the other hand, this is a very cheap movie, and finding professional actors must have been rather tricky. Many of the actors, most of whom are not listed on IMDb, were pretty wooden. The special effects aren't much to write home about, either. The bright red "70's blood," as I call it, is to be expected, but the vampire teeth used for the undead Satanists looked as though they were purchased out of one of those 25-cent vending machines seen in the opening walkways at your local department stores--the kind you might have used as a child while completing a Dracula costume for Halloween. It's hard to be scared of creatures with those plastic monstrosities sticking out of their mouths.

The plot is pretty basic. Mark, a young actor and Elvis Presley lookalike, arrives in town to investigate the mysterious death of his sister. As he continues searching, he finds that she was involved in a bizarre underground cult of devil-worshippers who, through some sort of dark rites, are able to reanimate the dead as some sort of Satanic vampire things that bite necks and suck the blood from the living.

This is a fun movie for those who enjoy cheap horror flicks that virtually nobody has ever heard of. I can honestly recommend this for that crowd. For those who prefer a higher-budget flick or something that had a little more talent behind it, I'd suggest steering clear of this one.

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.