Search - Blood Orgy Of The She-Devils on DVD

K. K. (GAMER)
Reviewed on 4/25/2020...

The cover is deceiving since this is an older 70s movie. Loud at times with a special old school horror plotline that I do not really care for but I know many others do in turn like. I like Christopher Lee and Vincent Price movies and that is how this movie was shot and felt like with the type of movie. The trailers of old movie previews of this type was kind of cool. A must for old school horror fans!

3 of 3 member(s) found this review helpful.

Could have been a Kinky Porn but...

Swartt Sixclaw | 10/14/2009

(2 out of 5 stars)

"What can I say about this Satanic film hmm. Well the pakaging is a little miss leading. At first glance your thinking this is a satanic porn film with hot girls dancing COMPLEATLY naked and stabbing men with spears. First of all there are only two sacrifice scenes in the whole film and the girls are not as blood thirsty as you might think. The story focuses on a witch named Mara who teaches people how to read their past lives. She acts more like a WICCAN coven leader than a Satanic witch however. It must also be known that the coven also display an anti male WICCAN feel to it as well. The film earns most of it's shock value to the past life flash backs, one scene includes a pocessed girl being stoned to death, another shows a torture and then a burning scene. If you like movies about witchcraft then try it out, but don't get it if your looking for sleazy gore and sex because your not going to find it here. By this time in cenema the witches in this movie should at least be naked as most cult films featured in the 1970s."

Occult Kneecapping And Dancing Witches In Bikinis!

Robert I. Hedges | 04/18/2010

(4 out of 5 stars)

""Blood Orgy of the She-Devils" is one in a long line of ridiculous but curiously entertaining films from B-movie king Ted V. Mikels. Ted is a good-humored eccentric who casts and re-casts the same people over and over again, so if you've seen more than one of his movies, you may start confusing the character traits of the principals. That's true in this case as there are several repeat offenders...I mean thespians...on the set for most of the movie, notably Tom Pace and Leslie McRae. You may remember McRae as Michele, the star dancer from Mikels' campy "Girl in Gold Boots." Here she's just as campy as ever (with much darker material) and yes, she gets to dance again. Pace you may also recall as the unlikable petty thug from "Girl in Gold Boots." Here they are dating, and boy are their dates bizarre.

The movie centers on Mara, Queen of the Black Witches (Lila Zaborin,) a shape-shifting embodiment of all that is evil, and her nefarious schemes and bloodthirsty ways. Most of the film is shot inside Mikels' own castle (that's right, Ted lived for fourteen years in an actual castle,) which provides the movie with a healthy dose of ambiance. The acting is better than in many of Mikels' pictures, although McRae apparently can't help being hammy. The film is long on seances and rituals and scary-sounding "witchspeak," but is essentially an old fashioned good-versus-evil plot, incorporating lots of painful past-life regressions, a burning at the stake, an exorcism gone horribly awry (leading to a stoning,) and Mara killing lots of people from a distance using witchcraft (I particularly found the fishbowl-assisted death of the guy who drowned on his highball at a party to be imaginative.) There's even a cameo by Ted V. Mikels himself, and as a special bonus, Ted plays the bongos for the soundtrack, setting the film to appropriate music.

In the end a sacrifice is interrupted by Earth-shattering lasers and religious exorcism meeting in a stylish maelstrom in Ted's front yard, resulting in lots of fires and lots of bikini-clad witch corpses in the castle. But where's Mara? Earlier in the film she turned into a black cat, but in the conclusion she turns into a bat. This bat provides the biggest moment of unintentional hilarity in the film as it is clearly in a string, and is quickly dispatched in a manner that reminded me of the scene from "Zontar: The Thing From Venus" where the injectapod is skewered with a fireplace poker. That would have been handy here, as the men who are ridding the castle of its evil place the bat on a fire and the spirit of Mara escapes, leaving open the possibility of a sequel. Come on Ted, it's been 38 years since you made this, but couldn't you still do "Revenge of Mara?" I'd buy it!

The film is a low-budget wonder, that looks better than you would expect from the title (there really is no blood orgy...) but suffers from overacting from some of the B-movie regulars (especially McRae and Mara's assistant, William Bagdad, who wears the most outlandish head garment I have ever seen throughout the movie.) Ted's castle provides an excellent and atmospheric set for the production, William Nipper's sound is very good at furthering the creepiness, and despite obviously cheap special effects, the film is effective if over-the-top. I have always found Mikels to be one of the most entertaining directors from the golden age of B-movies (though sometimes for unintended reasons.) He's self-effacing, good-humored and loves making movies. This movie won't scare you, but it will entertain anyone who wants to see a cutting-edge horror B-movie from the early 1970s.

There are several editions of this film available in several different packages. The cover illustrated for the Alpha Home Entertainment edition has absolutely nothing to do with the film whatsoever, but the cover from the Image Entertainment "Cult Cinema Collection" release is the real deal. The Image Entertainment DVD also features a great commentary track by Ted Mikels, the original movie trailer, which is very long by today's standards, and Mikels' filmography."