Satanic Panic is a 2019 comedy/horror film about a pizza delivery girl whose last order of the night turns into a nightmare.
Sam Craft (Hayley Griffith) starts a new job delivering pizza, a gig she got from her pal Duncan (AJ Bowen), who fancies himself her boyfriend (he’s not). Needing money, she finds out that tips are hard to come by in the route she’s given, and when she eventually ends up at a stately gated manor with her scooter stalled and another door slammed in her face with no cash in hand, she’s had enough and heads inside to get what’s due. Thing is, this ain’t no ordinary house, and she’s soon captured by a group of Satan worshipers trying to summon the demonic god Baphomet. All they need is a virgin. Guess who fits the bill.
You will definitely want to like director Chelsea Stardust‘s slightly off-kilter entry in this decidedly small subgenre where comedy meets horror, the premise sturdy and stocked with plenty of good performances. It’s light yet not cheap, packed with some fun and gooey visual effects and good bits that earn some laughs and a few jumps. And it tries hard to keep its tongue firmly in cheek, but what it doesn’t do it comes with a payoff, unable to really tap into the potential it sits upon.
That’s no fault of Griffith, who is almost unnaturally charming, finding just the right tone, the every girl spiralling into an utterly wacky world of mayhem, sex, death, and lots of blood. She is surprisingly convincing even as everything around her is decidedly not (purposefully so). This is Stardust’s feature length debut, and she’s out to make an impression, and by far, the best thing she’s got going for her is the cast, with Rebecca Romijn playing the part of Danica, the leader of the cult, who are of course, the upper crust of society doing deals with the dark side to stay that way.
Kudos also go to the visual effects team, who bring their game in spades, sticking to practical gore instead of CGI, which helps a lot in selling the campy fun. However, aside from these highlights, there is a lack of sophistication in the presentation, the humor never quite as edgy or sataritical as it feels it should be, and while not every movie like this needs a social message, the commentary it sets up on class division is never really played out.
Where it finally stumbles is how it simply can’t make the comedy or the horror work together. There are some smart moments that mine some real possibilities out of the script, but most wind up deflated and underwhelming, keeping the punch to a minimum. More so, like so many that try this, it’s just not sustainable, the whole thing feeling like it runs out of gas once all the cards are on the table. Like I said, you will want to like this and maybe that creates bigger expectations. I know I’ll be curious what Stardust does next, her imagination clearly source for some creativity that should earn her plenty more fans.