At this religious ceremony in The Philippines, the penitents show proof of their faith by scourging themselves, but not everyone there is quite so noble, as the evil Prince of Magic is also making an appearance to tell one of the most respected community leaders, Uncle Miguel, that he is to be vanquished. To demonstrate this, the Prince and his men use their magical powers on Miguel and his followers, including making the old man's head spin around on his shoulders which sends him to his deathbed. While he is there, he informs those gathered around him that there is one hope to put an end to the machinations of malevolence...
And that would be one of The Philippines' biggest stars, Ramon Revilla, leading man of many a local movie where he gained the reputation as King of Amulets seeing as how his characters often wielded a handy magic token to beat down their enemies. He also gained a reputation as king of the illegitimate children, reputedly siring around seventy kids not all of whom were born in wedlock, a big deal in a staunchly Catholic country, though he did make amends by introducing a law which stopped the illegitimate being pariahs and recognising them as their fathers' offspring by adopting the name of their parent.
Revillo wasn't such a powerful celebrity that he could get laws changed just with a wave of his mighty hand, he turned to politics when the acting career lost its charm, as a number of Filipino stars were wont to do. But to get an impression of what the man was like as a star, The Killing of Satan was probably your best bet, being the most well known work outside of his native land and showcasing him as the hero of action-packed adventures which to outside eyes looked, there was no other way of putting it, seriously wacky. Not everyone was going to last the distance with your average Filipino fantasy flick, but for those who did they would be rewarded with spectacle on an impoverished yet enthusiastic scale with energy beams and gore aplenty.
Of course, the film industry there was most widely seen across the world for the co-productions with the United States, where American (and European, on occasion) producers would see this as a perfect location for cheap and cheerful ways of making movies with exotic settings, especially handy if you wanted to create a jungle warfare epic on reasonable budget. Yet what was not so widespread in distribution was the nation's homegrown efforts, mainly because they would mean the most to a local audience and there just wasn't the market for them abroad. That can mean foreigners were none the wiser about the significance after watching one than they were before, but it did prompt some hearty laughter at how downright crazy they were, this one a prime example unless you had an affection for snakes in which case this was true horror.
Revillo played the ex-con (for good reasons) nephew of Miguel, Lando, whose name is repeated about a billion times in case you didn't catch it the first time, and he is the chosen one, destined to battle the Prince on his own terms and as the title suggests get a shot at the big guy of evil, Satan himself. The religious aspects were a strange interpretation of Catholicism mixed with more mystical elements, though that didn't quite explain the sight of, say, a bloke throwing himself under a huge boulder to stop it only to be crushed flat as if in a cartoon, his head unharmed and ranting. The magic powers in evidence were created with rays added in post-production for the most part, ludicrously cheap but adding to the sense of watching grown men and women indulging in the sort of games not out of place in a playground, although the oddly prevalent Filipino visual motif of a bunch of naked women locked in a cage was in evidence here. As Revillo seeks to save his kidnapped daughter from the underworld, if anything this got weirder, and they weren't lying about that title. Music by Ernani Cuenco.
