Arrow Video, with domestic sales and distribution support provided by MVD Entertainment Group, has picked Aug. 31 for a new Blu-ray edition of director Bernard McEveety’s horror tale, The Brotherhood of Satan.
Veteran character actor L.Q. Jones took a chance on producing films in the 1970s and delivered two indie gems, A Boy and His Dog (which he also directed and wrote) and The Brotherhood of Satan, which gave him the opportunity to have fun with friend and fellow character actor Strother Martin.
The pair had just come from Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and were more or less falling into being type-cast as cowboys, which, was a good living — separately they appeared during this period in such films as The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, True Grit, The Hunting Party, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, etc. … you can see the pattern.
With The Brotherhood of Satan, Strother Martin gets to chew the scenery as Doc, the devil-worshipping leader of a murderous coven of witches and L.Q. Jones, when not directing, gets to be the good-sheriff out to solve the mystery of why dozens of people have recently died horrible deaths in the little hamlet of Hillsboro (an actual town in New Mexico).
What’s clever about The Brotherhood of Satan is that simple children’s toys suddenly take on deadly powers (caused by Doc and his disciples). This element allows the mystery of what is going on to build and build, which gives the film some nice twists and takes it out of the run-of-the-mill devil-cult sort of horror film.
Into this “cauldron of death” come Ben (Charles Bateman), his daughter, K.T. (Geri Reischl in her film debut — I Dismember Mama, The Meat Puppet) and Ben’s girlfriend, Nicky (Anna Capri — Piranha, Enter the Dragon), who don’t seem to be able to leave … with good reason!!
Bonus goodies include a newly-prepared commentary featuring Kim Newman and Sean Hogan, the new featurette titled “Satanic Panic: How the 1970s Conjured the Brotherhood of Satan” and a video session with actors Jonathan Erickson Eisley and Alyson Moore (as children in the film).
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