One of the sets of arc words recurring throughout Satan's Touch is that "poker is a game of deception." Well, so is filmmaking. You take a bunch of images of real things and make them into things that are untrue. But Satan's Touch plays the deception game better than all others: the title alone, in addition to the box art and the first few minutes, will lead you to believe that this is a horror film. But oh, no. Satan's Touch is much more special than that. Satan's Touch is better than anything you could ever win in a Vegas casino. As the movie's recurring song keeps singing...take it from me, take it from me, we've hit the jackpot.
The film tells the story of Jim Parrish, a middle-aged grocery store owner from Crocus Hills, Iowa who is one day made the target of Satan himself. Satan looks like the Gem Fusion of Bob Ross and Kenny Loggins, and occasionally enters the film to answer his car phone and make quips like, "Earthquakes? Of course we do earthquakes. No, no...acts of God is just an expression." He decides to give Jim the horrible, horrible curse of winning every single gambling game he plays. He also sets Jim up with a set of raffle tickets for he and his wife to go to Las Vegas! Jim soon obtains a small fortune, but of course this does not go unnoticed by the casino's owner, who appears to be Stan Lee. He and his staff spend most of the movie trying to figure out Jim's system, which you'd think would make them want to kill him. Instead, the threat to Jim's life comes when it's exposed that one of Boss Lee's minions is trimming pennies out of the casino's computer, causing him to go rogue and try to kill the casino's cybersecurity lady--Jim essentially just gets in the way, and earns a tranq dart for his trouble. When Jim decides to end it all by folding four aces, Satan ditches his "victim" and Jim is able to prove that he can lose. This is enough for the casino to let him go, and Jim is freed from Satan's unexpected kindness forevermore.
Yes, this is a gambling thriller-cum-anti-gambling melodrama marketed as a horror film. As you might expect, everything is all the over the place. The movie starts out almost like an anachronistic '80s PureFlix movie, with Jim using a Christian argument to try to dissuade one of his customers, an old lady, from being a kleptomaniac. And both Jim and his wife believe that gambling is sinful. This is backed up by the fact that the gambling is facilitated by Satan himself. But again, Satan never brings Jim to any actual harm, and Jim's method of escaping his unbeknownst demonic pact is to stop playing, which would be a problem if it wasn't for the fact that he never displayed any signs of self-abuse through his gambling. All throughout the film he makes only small bets and remains entirely innocent and humble in his winnings. He doesn't even come close to corruption, and the violence in the film comes from circumstances entirely independent from him and Satan. Gambling is a positive force in this universe, even when it is powered by the devil.
Consider: the heads and employees of the casino are shown to be good people. While the boss is unfriendly towards Jim for taking a lot of his money, he never threatens to kill him--he just makes a blackmail tape, which is of questionable value anyway, since Jim's answers to propositions of extramarital affairs amount to roughly, "nah, but thanks anyway." When the conflict shifts to the shady bastard who skimming their dough, it is clear who the film favors. Sure, they cheat people, but they do so in a friendly way. There's an incredibly strange sequence at the start of the film, which just keeps going just when you think it's stopped. A severely inebriated man complains to a bouncer that he can't win at the slot machines. The bouncer offers to introduce him to a machine which "always pays out," which turns out to be the snack machine. After that, he offers to take him to a phone so he can call a cab, but this turns out to be a broken pay phone which eats even more of his money. Finally, another bouncer takes him to a change machine, where he's overjoyed to find a machine that at last pays out, even if it's just turning his bills into coins. It is one of the most bizarre sequences I've seen set to film, and it presents the staff of this casino as jolly jokers. Oh, those lovable scamps...stripping people of everything they're worth.
But on a more serious note, this movie seems at times to be a documentary on casinos, and that probably ties in with the protagonistic portrayal of powers that be at the casino. It's worth noting John Goodell's only other credit was on the 1974 cinema verite documentary Always a New Beginning, about the education of brain-damaged children, which was nominated for a fucking Oscar. So it's no wonder that there are a lot of shots of cards, chips, and bills being spread about, alongside lengthy Vegas-streets peoplewatching segments, and pseudo-interviews about the fine points of cybersecurity in the gambling business. It's pretty incredible.
There's always just a lot of weird shit that happens, even outside of the Satan stuff. This is a movie whose idea of realistic dialogue is, "I haven't enjoyed an all-night poker game like that in a long time!" Similarly, at the start of the movie, we have shots superimposed over larger shots of the exterior of Jim's grocery store, and a spinning roulette wheel. I will always appreciate pointlessly artsy composition like that. Finally, in the last scene, someone shuffles a deck using magic tricks, complete with Casio stings that sync up to his hand gestures. With these mixed in with everything else, Satan's Touch is an ineffably fun movie that only slightly drags, unworthy of the hate it's received in its scanty reviews over the years. Horror fans may want to take a rain check, however, unless you can keep your mind open.
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