"Satan's Baby Doll" review

Satan's Baby Doll (1982)
AKA La bimba di Satana

Director: Mario Bianchi
Writers: Gabriele Crisanti

Jacqueline Dupré ... Myra / Maria
Mariangela Giordano ... Solo
Aldo Sambrell ... Antonio Aguilar
Joe Davers
Giancarlo Del Duca
Alfonso Gaita

I saw the cover for "Satan's Baby Doll" and was hooked. It was love at first sight. I was whispering sweet love songs to it: Suddenly, life has new meaning, to me... I can't imagine how it's escaped my attention. Surely I would have heard something about this obviously fantastic film by now. The DVD cover has a winged demon, (Satan I suppose), rubbing a girls naked body, (Satan's baby doll I presume). This exploitation film has been kept from me for too long. It was time to see what Satan does with his baby doll.

"Satan's Baby Doll" has nothing to do with Satan or babies or dolls. It concerns the trials and tribulations of a dysfunctional family inside a big, scary castle. The matriarch of the family dies but her horny soul wants to live on through her frequently naked daughter. The mother wants to use her to get revenge on everybody in the house so she can finally be with the one person she truly loved. She's had a crush on the castles live-in nun, (who's also frequently naked), and has come back from the dead for her chaste body.

Nothing says good times like lustful possessions and naked nuns. "Satan's Baby Doll" has all of the elements of a classic exploitation flick. Lascivious evil spirits, gratuitous nudity and naughty nuns are a good starting point for any B-movie. But now I realize why I've never heard of this movie before. "Satan's Baby Doll" does not come close to the sleaze potential it's DVD cover art promises. The idea of a mother coming back from the dead to use her daughter's body for revenge should have been a sleaze gold mine but the concept is wasted on banal scenes of bloodless revenge.

Every time the mother's spirit jumped into her daughter's body, I was expecting the daughter to jump on someone else's body for a little revenge sex from beyond the grave. Instead the possessed girl dispatches her mother's enemies as quickly and as mundanely as possible. You would think a soul brought back from the dead would be filled with insatiable bloodlust but you'd be wrong. There is almost no blood shown in any of the daughter's attacks. I was quite disappointed at the dead mother's lack of depraved imagination.

On a positive note, "Satan's Baby Doll" does have copious amounts of nudity. All of the women get naked at regular intervals. But overall it's not sleazy enough to necessitate a viewing. Still, the DVD cover is amazing. It might be the sleaziest cover of all time. I just wish it had the movie to go along with its salacious picture of an ass grabbing devil.

SCORE: 2 out of 4 satan's baby dolls