Back in his Andy Hardy days, I wonder if young Mickey Rooney ever imagined that sixty years later, he would appear in a low-budget, erotic horror movie. I like to think yes and that it explains the twinkle in his eyes…
Tortured nun, Sister Katherine (Tina Krause) supervises a quintet of female college students on a weekend jaunt in the woods. For some peculiar reason, good girl Mary (Jacqueline Hickel), sexpot Clarice (Nikki Gahan), sultry Jackie (Lauren Ryland), vain Tiffany (Lauren McCarthy) and cute, but repressed Michelle (Courtney Pahlke) are studying pagan rituals at their church-run college, which Father Palmer (Jason Matthew Palmer) unconvincingly suggests is to bolster their faith.
Alone in their log cabin, the girls dabble in some witchcraft fun and wind up summoning Lilith, the Mother of All Demons. Shortly thereafter, Clarice starts spouting Latin whilst frenziedly screwing her boyfriend and come daybreak is lured by a creepy nun into a silly schoolgirl spanking hallucination before taking a tumble off nearby cliff. What began as harmless fun, turns into a nightmare as the soul-sucking succubus stalks the girls in their dreams, turning their secret desires against them. Meanwhile, Sister Katherine battles her own twisted desires amidst gory flashbacks to her own childhood trauma.
With a script that mimics a horror geek’s idea of how girls behave (as when the friends nonchalantly strip off for a slumber party game/demonic ritual), this doesn’t rank among the more sophisticated examples of erotic horror. Mark Vadik pulls off some stylish visuals and inventive editing tricks amidst plentiful T & A for the raincoat crowd, but his clumsy script is never remotely convincing. A tendency to have bible-quoting tramps pop up and provide portentous warnings also provokes unintentional chuckles. The dream sequences exhibit some imagination before turning predictably nasty: Tiffany as a self-obsessed 1930s movie star liaises with Peter Lorre-style mad scientist; Jackie molested in a sleazy strip club by a sweaty bartender; Michelle as a closet S & M freak who commits accidental incest.
None of the girls’ supposedly sinful secrets seem particularly heinous and it is never clear whether they are agents of Lilith or being persecuted. Indie scream queen Tina Krause wavers from somnambulant muttering to boggle-eyed overstatement, but the rest of the likeable cast appear enthusiastic. Lovely Lauren Ryland and Courtney Pahlke in particular strike sparks of interest in their suppressed traumas, which makes their abrupt fates seem that more wasteful. The Mickster actually enlivens the movie with his cameo as a kindly, worldly-wise groundskeeper who advises Mary to “look for the small miracles in life”. While dull Mary is marked as the good girl early on, the film bizarrely violates its own deus ex machina set up for (a pet peeve this) a generically dumb, gotcha ending.
