Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!
Sometimes I wonder if the Satanic Panic of the 1980s was fueled in part by the Satan-infused movies of the previous decade. The ‘70s appeared to be rife with cinematic stories of people turning their life over to Satan. Sometimes you get The Touch of Satan, which ended up as one of the better late-MST3K episodes. Sometimes you get The Devil’s Rain, which featured a surprisingly robust cast for a B-movie fueled by the devil. And sometimes you get The Brotherhood of Satan, a movie that is absolutely bonkers for part of it, but still manages to bring in some real evil and a few decent surprises.
This is also a film that features the talents of L.Q. Jones, a character actor whose career spanned 40+ years, and who named himself after the character he played in his first movie. Jones is virtually unrecognizable in this without his full, giant mustache. Jones is also an uncredited co-author of the screenplay. He plays the sheriff in this, and one of the reasons he’s hard to spot is that he genuinely looks about 10 years younger than his actual age—quite a feat for the early 1970s. He also wrote the follow-up book adaptation.
The film opens with kids playing with a toy tank intercut with a tank crushing a car with people inside of it. Are these two things connected? Of course they are, but we’re not going to find out why until the end of the film. The scene of destruction is discovered by widower Ben Holden (Charles Bateman), his girlfriend Nicky (Ahna Capri), and Ben’s daughter from his marriage, K.T. (Geri Reischl). They head into town and are confronted by the sheriff (Jones), who seems to believe that they are connected with something terrible happening in the town. Ben and company are soon released, but Ben wrecks the car when a young girl suddenly appears on the road in front of them.
The reason the town is so upset is that there has been a rash of disappearances of children and terrible accidents over the past few days. More than two dozen adults have been killed and about a dozen children missing. When the sheriff heads out to the latest accident with his deputy Tobey (Alvy Moore) and Doc Duncan, the town physician (Strother Martin), they discover the crushed car contained two more residents of the town, and naturally the couple’s young son is missing.
If you connected dead parents and missing kids to the title of the movie, you’re exactly where you should be. That’s precisely where we are going. As it happens, there is a contingent of witches in the small town. How that gets us to a crushed car and people suddenly dying in their homes is more of a stretch, but we will get there eventually. We’re going to find out the identities of the Satanists pretty quickly, and they’re going to be at odds with our good guys—the sheriff, his deputy, Ben and his family, and the local priest (Charles Robinson), who is the first to suspect the influence from parts infernal. When Ben and Nicky attempt to leave again, they get a flat and discover that K.T. has vanished from the backseat of the car.
The film I am most reminded of is The Devil’s Rain, although The Brotherhood of Satan predates that one by several years. There is not an attempt to make this a camp story; it’s played entirely straight, and it works because of that. Oh, the final ritual gets a bit over-the-top, but that’s to be expected from a film where the opening sequence literally includes a tank running over a car. And even though that big ritual scene gets out of control, it works and while not particularly scary, it is pretty disturbing.
There’s nothing in The Brotherhood of Satan that is particularly terrifying, but it’s not that kind of movie. It’s aiming much more for a feel of dread, something that is more overwhelming than we at first realize, and that we might be powerless to actually deal with. It manages to hit that mark well enough. You’re not going to lose any sleep over anything that happens in the film and you’re probably not going to take it very seriously unless you are someone who is very invested in the idea of demonic influence.
Final analysis--The Brotherhood of Satan isn’t as scary as I would have liked, but it’s a lot better than I would have expected, and the last few minutes are a doozy.
Why to watch The Brotherhood of Satan: It doesn’t hold back on going for the weird.
Why not to watch: It doesn’t make sense for a while.