"Daughters of Satan" is a 1972 "Horror" movie, that isn't scary or Satanic at all. Calling it a "Horror" movie is a stretch, as much of it is just boring.
The plot barely makes any sense, and drags on for much longer than it needs to. The movie runs for an hour an a half, and after the first 30 minutes, I kept checking the timer to see how close I was to the end.
The idea to the movie is that Tom Selleck's character buys a painting of some witches being burned, of which, one looks just like his wife. Various witchy things happen but have no real substance or bearing on the plot. A lot of the movie is just "so weird" type things. The wife being able to recall a random date when some witches were burned, a dog that shows up and hates Tom Selleck, and things like that.
Much of the audio to the movie was terrible quality, so it was hard to make out what they were saying at times.
There were a couple scenes in the movie where a "Satanic Ritual" was sort of being performed, but it just involved a nude woman being whipped in front of muscular men. At one point, Tom Selleck's wife is forced to spit on an idol of Jesus being crucified, but the actress just sputtered on it, like she sneezed.
The movie isn't even laughably bad...it's just bad. Boring, and doesn't even rip off Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan. I was fully expecting the movie to take a lot from that...but they didn't.
There were some semi-funny parts to the movie, though I don't believe they were intended to be humorous. For example, when the dog kept barking at Tom Selleck, the housekeeper didn't understand why, insinuating that his character must have been a bad dude. Selleck made a remark about going to another country in the past and eating a dog, which tasted "really good". The movie definitely did not age well in many parts. A lot of it is pretty racially insensitive. I couldn't help but notice how the white characters were rich, while the brown characters were service workers or uneducated.
I was hoping that this movie would have scratched an itch for early Satanic Movies that came out after the founding of the Church of Satan, but this did not happen. It barely established any link between witches and Satan, and instead was more of a love story about rich white people in the Philippines.
I tried to find any sort of reviews for the movie in the newspaper archives, but there weren't any, from where I looked. Mostly just ads for the movie. In 1972, the movie was often paired with "Superbeast".
In 1973, "Daughters of Satan" was sometimes featured with the Vincent Price movie "Theatre of Blood".
Overall, I can't recommend this film to anyone. The most interesting part to it is the name. There could have been a lot of potential with it, but the actual story does nothing, and goes nowhere. It seems that the writers had a very surface level of witchcraft, magick, and the paranormal, when writing this. If you can even call the script a piece of writing at all.
I gave this half a star on letterboxd. I don't even think this deserves a slime, because it wasn't even funny.
