SATAN'S BLADE - 'Satan's Blade' is a lopsided film. A blade bites a tree trunk - the knife glows red and so does the tree. Then there's an overly melodramatic and sadistic bank robbery that only really happens because the clerks answer the door to someone tapping on it with a clearly visible gun. Then there's a bunch of people out for a vacation deep within snowy woodland, and this bit cuts deepest of all because it fills out the next forty minutes or so and is almost aggressively boring. 'Satan's Blade' is a regional slasher that only remembers it's a slasher when it's time for the audience to go home. Don't come here if you want a steady trickle of kills and thrills, you'll be knee deep in a newly minted lawyer's relationship problems for most of it. Something rises to the surface though, a strangeness - death scenes that are made to look weirdly abstract, a wintry piano score that alternates with buzzing funereal synths, expressionistic lighting that fills walls with distended shadows, all the weird lore they toss in about mountain men - and it's a film about a possessed knife at the end of the day. Authentically strange stuff that will reward the patient few - remember when Arrow used to put out stuff like this?
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