SATAN'S BLACK WEDDING - What a joy to finally see some Nick Millard on blu ray! I speak as a convert who's had a real yen for 'Satan's Black Wedding' ever since the Shock-o-Rama DVD of yore. Like its companion 'Criminally Insane', 'Satan's Black Wedding' is a threadbare piece of seventies drive-in whose amateurish veneer conceals something more mysterious. A young actor (dime store Elvis-alike Greg Braddock ) heads out to North LA to make sense of his sister's suicide; learning of her occult ties, he uncovers a trail that leads to a sinister church. The plot might sound as shabby and throwaway as any other seventies cheapie, but as we watch the credits roll over that Goya painting, we sense the stirrings of a dark atmosphere that surpasses the usual B-movie string pulling. What's behind the tone is hard to pinpoint; skeletal shivers of the piano score, windchimes dancing over valleys of mist, swish seventies interiors looking soulless and bloody in the aftermath of hilltop murder - it's trashy but it's arty. There are dialog scenes where everyone's head looks framed out of kilter, conversations made up of pauses, trees always rustling in the wind, and the lapses of competence, which are possibly even more numerous than those offered up by the usual grindhouse fodder, seem more eerie than amusing (those plastic vampire tusks might look like a joke but slip them in the middle of a brutal house invasion backed by Moonlight Sonata and no-one's laughing anymore). This weirdly abstract haze of unease finally settles in the crypt beneath the church, in a downer conclusion that at least makes sense of the title.
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