THE BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW (aka SATAN'S SKIN), 1971. Written by Robert Wynne-Simmons and Piers Haggard. Directed by Piers Haggard.
After several viewings, the film continues to disappoint me, but at the same time, it offers details I respect.
I can praise the simple but effectively eerie score by Marc Wilkinson. I admire the cinematography of Dick Bush, who relies on windows and fireplaces to provide chiaroscuro lighting, and who enhances the beauty of several strikingly attractive women. The film's direction offers good moments of stage blocking and action, especially in one shot where an empty forest is revealed to be full of people. The film brims with a stark, late autumn atmosphere, and it opens with a promisingly spooky sequence in which a farmer in a plowed field uncovers a monstrous face.
Where the film falls apart is in the script. It relies on the characters to act according to the needs of the plot, which often makes their actions hard to fathom.
For example: The visiting fiancee of an upper-class young man is forced by his disapproving uncle, the Judge, to spend the night away from the rest of his family in their creepy attic. Suddenly, she begins to scream. So great is her fear that she lashes out at the woman who comes to rescue her.
What does the Judge do? Does he try to understand what has terrified this woman? No, he slams the attic door and leaves her trapped inside.
"Nail the door shut!" he says. "She's fit only for Bedlam. I'll have two men take her away in the morning."
The judge had already been established as a cold-hearted man who disdains the "simple" country folk around him, but this goes beyond characterization into narrative convenience. The plot requires that the Judge lock up the girl, and so he does.
Later on, the woman's fiance, mourning her forced absence, goes up to the attic and is attacked by a clawed and hairy paw that reaches out from under the floorboards. He fights it off, and blocks it under the floor with a heavy chest. Then he gets the hell out of that creepy attic, right?
No! He lies down beside the chest and goes to sleep as if nothing had happened.
When characters ignore their own logic to follow the illogic of a badly-developed plot, it can lead to unmotivated shifts in character consistency.
Another example. These are not direct quotations; the sarcasm is mine.
DOCTOR: I suspect witchcraft.
JUDGE: Witchcraft is dead, and discredited.
DOCTOR: But I have a book, here, all about witchcraft. Look at this crude woodcut. Doesn't it resemble the fiend that neither of us actually saw? The fiend that you mocked as mere animal remains, and a waste of your time?
JUDGE: Might I request the loan of this book? It might merit further study.
How convenient for the plot!
Then the cold-hearted Judge goes away for half the film. Why? Business elsewhere: hardly a strong motivation. At the end of the film, he returns to become the conquering hero, because the script needed someone to do it. He also returns as an expert in fighting witchcraft, because the script needed him to be one.
Plausible reasons for character change? Not in this film.
Beyond its need for the characters to act unrealistically to suit the plot, the great limitation of the film is that it becomes episodic and arbitrary. Characters arrive and depart; major characters fade into the background and give way to new major characters never properly introduced; important events take place (or so we are told) off-camera. The film is like a crowded party in which faces loom at you and then retreat before you can grasp who they are. This makes THE BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW seem like a multi-episode TV serial that had been chopped-up and awkwardly condensed into 90 minutes.
And so the film goes on, looking good, sounding good, with unmotivated actions by the inconsistent characters, until the finale, in which evil is vanquished with disappointing ease. The end, fade to black, drive carefully on your way home.
This is a film hard to recommend, yet at the same time, a film hard to ignore. What it does well, it does very well; what it does badly is a damned shame.
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