Ota Richter's inchoate, singularly meandering, yet miraculously entertaining pseudo-slasher, RPG horror loon-fest, 'Der Satan führt!' aka 'Skullduggery' (1983) is, frankly, at best, an amateurish, bafflingly ill-conceived cinematic jigsaw puzzle with innumerable cogent parts wilfully misplaced in order to make a lucid reading nigh on impossible! All that gibber-guff being said and done, many, if not all of life's pleasures are poorly expressed in verbiage, frequently losing all their vibrancy in the telling, and so thusly are the manifold, 'VERY bad movie' pleasures of 'Skullduggery' equally neutered, since it is absolutely a 'seeing is disbelieving' kinda' deal, otherwise much, if not all, of the confounding idiocies herein will be lost in translation!
Curiously, I found that there are no ready, quick-quip comparisons to Richter's irritatingly oblique, and earnestly stupid spookshow, and if not exactly a B-cult in the making, it will most certainly induce a malign, 'just-please-make-it stop' migraine in anyone foolish enough to take this utterly preposterous film at face value! In all good conscience, I must add this necessary caveat that all stalwart, B-Movie mega-fans should take great care before viewing this abstruse 80s oddity, as pedants, especially those with a low tolerance for narrative incongruity will no doubt balk at the fiendish levels of filmmaking skulduggery Mr. Ota Richter so gleefully perpetrates on his uniformly befuddled audience! 'Der Satan führt' isn't so much Marmite, as a Deep fried Marmite & Surströmming Rissole, and if said odoriferous dish sounds even remotely appealing, you are no less debased than I, and, perhaps, may well find yourself making similarly absurd, embarrassingly overwrought claims about this confounding feature film's most dubious cinematic virtues! The far from unjustly maligned indie horror, 'Skullduggery' remains a puzzling, patently absurd movie misfire, and yet, I found it weirdly satisfying in an almost exhilarating 'please-just-make-it-stop' kinda' way! Approach with utmost caution!
Curiously, I found that there are no ready, quick-quip comparisons to Richter's irritatingly oblique, and earnestly stupid spookshow, and if not exactly a B-cult in the making, it will most certainly induce a malign, 'just-please-make-it stop' migraine in anyone foolish enough to take this utterly preposterous film at face value! In all good conscience, I must add this necessary caveat that all stalwart, B-Movie mega-fans should take great care before viewing this abstruse 80s oddity, as pedants, especially those with a low tolerance for narrative incongruity will no doubt balk at the fiendish levels of filmmaking skulduggery Mr. Ota Richter so gleefully perpetrates on his uniformly befuddled audience! 'Der Satan führt' isn't so much Marmite, as a Deep fried Marmite & Surströmming Rissole, and if said odoriferous dish sounds even remotely appealing, you are no less debased than I, and, perhaps, may well find yourself making similarly absurd, embarrassingly overwrought claims about this confounding feature film's most dubious cinematic virtues! The far from unjustly maligned indie horror, 'Skullduggery' remains a puzzling, patently absurd movie misfire, and yet, I found it weirdly satisfying in an almost exhilarating 'please-just-make-it-stop' kinda' way! Approach with utmost caution!