My Sweet Satan

This is the kind of film that Harmony Korine later became more successful doing...that is, chronicling the lives of bored suburban white trash Satan worshippers on dope. Van Bebber knows his milieu and does what he can in 19 minutes but it's really just buildup to a conclusion you won't soon forget.

i just saw a bootleg copy of my sweet satan, and i have a really hard time believing that this wasn't meant to be funny. i am also a maker of low quality films and finishing a shot when someone popped this in. it was hilarious! the drug use, the "satanism", the portrayal of teenage wasteland, we couldn't stop laughing! we're people ever really scared of this?

on the production side-it was actually well done considering what i hear he had to work with.

the acting is bad, but i doubt he was paying anybody, so that is forgiveable.

OK... lets get the record straight. This movie is about Ricky Kasso, a knob of a teen who was involved in a "Satanic" cult called The Knights of the Black Circle. He killed his friend over drugs, and was high on mescaline when he did it. Nothing extraordinary, just strange. Fear Factory does a great song called 0-0 about this murder...its on the album Obsolete. I cant believe the review someone wrote about this movie talking about Satan worship and such... thanks for the religious right comment, but there are much more shocking things out there than some high school kid killing his friend over some imaginary bad guy. Thats right, I said it... Satan is my favorite IMAGINARY character. Well, him and Han Solo, and the tall man from Phantasm. This is a short film (like 20-30mins or so) but is really good. Good luck finding it. Watching this movie combined with a little internet research on the subject (http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/4077/kasso.html) makes for a nice night of psychotropy.

Apparently based on a real life murder case, low-budget short My Sweet Satan stars Jim Van Bebber (director of cult low budget classics Deadbeat at Dawn and The Manson Family) as Ricky, a Satan worshipping, drug dealing low-life with really stupid hair who kills one of his reprobate pals for stealing his drug money (and possibly for daring to have an even sillier haircut than himself).

It's hard to like a film that is packed so full of thoroughly unlikeable characters sporting, but hey, it's under twenty minutes long, and is worth seeing if only for the painful looking nipple-piercing scene (which is done for real) and the truly repugnant murder in which the victim is stabbed repeatedly by Ricky before he and a friend stomp the poor sap's head into an unrecognisable smushy mess of blood, bone, brains, and eyeballs.

I recently bought Arrow's excellent blu-ray of Jim Van Bebber's cult classic "Deadbeat by Dawn" (1988), amongst the extras are four of his short films including this one, however the year given is 1993, not 1994. Once again Van Bebber not only writes and directs but also plays the lead role. In this instance he is Ricky, a Satanist with "Ozzy" tattooed on his knuckles who wears an Iron Maiden t-shirt and sports a bizarre Hare Krishna type haircut. He and a fellow Satan metalhead pick on a teen called Gary who sports a shocking ginger mullet. Ricky - "Say you love Satan", Gary - "I love my mother". At only 14 minutes there is very little plot but we are treated to must be the most violent and goriest human sacrifice that I have seen. Odd flashes of old carvings and paintings of The Devil make a nice touch. A close up of a nipple piecing is not for the screamish!