An Angel for Satan (1966)

Italian Poster

Sculptor Roberto Merigi is brought to the Italian town of Montebruno to restore a statue that had been submerged in the lake abutting Count Montebruno’s estate. A recent drought had lowered the water level of the lake so much that the statue, which had been underwater for 200 years, was seen and fished out of the lake. Unfortunately, the statue has an ominous legend surrounding it: if the statue is restored, the entire village will fall victim to tragedy.

Right after Roberto gets to town, Count Montebruno’s niece, Harriet (played by Barbara Steele), arrives from England. She was sent away for schooling at the age of five, and she’s now returned to claim her inheritance. Once the sculptor lays eyes on her, he’s both transfixed by her beauty and a little freaked out by how much she looks like the statue that he’s working on. As it turns out (stop me if you’ve heard this one before), she’s the spitting image of her ancestor Madelina, who had the statue carved of herself to preserve her beauty forever. Still, Roberto can’t keep his eyes off of her, so he persuades her to “model” for his restoration work on the statue. (I have to admit that the statue looks like it needs less of a restoration and more of a good hosing down; besides some mud and some dried-up vegetation, it looks to be pretty intact. It also looks as if it’s made out of plaster or clay rather than marble, which underscores the film’s budgetary constraints. But I digress.)

Harriet starts exhibiting some bizarre behaviors. She starts making sexual advances on various people in the town, including the halfwit gardener at the estate, her personal maid’s schoolteacher beau AND the maid herself, and the strongest guy in the town, who’s married and has five kids. Roberto, as this weird behavior is ramping up, is awakened in the middle of the night by some woman who’s calling his name. He follows the sound to the studio where he’s working on the statue, and the voice tells him that she is Belinda, Madelina’s jealous cousin, who was killed when, out of hatred, she toppled Madelina’s statue into the lake and accidentally fell in with it. Also, she’s back now to get her revenge.

Afterwards, indeed, the whole town is cursed, as Harriet/Belinda causes lots of people to die. Roberto at least gets the statue finished and mounted on its original pedestal by the lake. He thinks that he knows what’s going on, but can he save Harriet from the spirit of her crazed ancestor?

To give away anything about the ending would be a huge disservice to those of you reading this who’ve never seen the film, so I’m not going to spoil things for you. I have to admit that I thought that the first half of the film was quite draggy, but things picked up nicely once Harriet started trying to seduce everyone in sight. It’s a good-looking film, too.

Michael Weldon, in the Psychotronic Encyclopedia, calls the film “little-known and fairly perverse,” and he goes on to note that it bypassed theaters in the US, going straight to TV in 1973 in a package of horror films. The copy of the film that I watched was on a double-feature DVD (along with The Long Hair of Death) released by Midnight Choir back in 2009. It went out of print rather quickly, due to some rights issues. The print for An Angel for Satan used for the DVD is a weird conglomeration of source material: it’s an Italian-language print with French credits and subtitles in English.

The thing that most confuses me about the film’s history is that, at the time that it went into syndication on television, it would have been dubbed into English, not subtitled, and it would have had English credits as well…yet I can’t find a dubbed copy of the film anywhere. Believe me, I’ve looked. Back in the ‘70s, only prestige foreign films ever showed up on TV in a subtitled form; for example, Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad showed up with subtitles, and the TV Source Book for syndication packages clearly states that the package that those two films were in was comprised of “Classic films with English subtitles.” If the Source Book didn’t specifically state that a package had subtitled films, the films in a package were dubbed.

My fairly beat-up copy of the TV Source Book

Another point worth making is that horror films were very rarely subtitled for television up until the late ‘80s. I can’t find any instance of a horror film in the Source Book that has subtitles. And one more thing: the syndication package that An Angel for Satan showed up in was called “5 Shock Features,” and it was made up of An Angel for Satan, Cave of the Living Dead, Fear Chamber, The Sound of Horror, and Superargo Vs. Diabolicus. Oddly enough, the package was released to television by Columbia Pictures, who usually dealt in a higher class of product. All of these films were foreign productions, yet the Source Book doesn’t say anything about subtitles. So, if anybody has a line on an English-dubbed version of the film, whether through a beat-up 16mm syndication print or via a recording made in the early days of VCRs, please leave me a note in the comments section. I’d love to see the dubbed version.

So, to recap (or “tl;dr” as the kids are typing these days): An Angel for Satan looks good and starts slow, but it gains momentum until a fairly memorable finale. And no, I won’t spoil the ending for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, but I will say this: Scooby-Doo. Once you see the film, you’ll understand.

Here’s the Italian trailer, for those of you who understand Italian. If you don’t, you can tinker around with the settings and get YouTube to auto-generate English subtitles, of a sort:

And here’s the full feature! Again, if you play around with the settings long enough, you can get YouTube to auto-generate English subtitles. For some reason, this copy of the film is about four minutes shorter than the print on the DVD; perhaps user “B is for B-movies” has slightly sped up the speed to throw the copyright police off their game.  And remember to watch it soon, just in case it gets yanked:

Up next: The hell run that you make alone!