Review of The Devil's Plaything

Sexploitation maestro Joe Sarno did his best work with sordid, yet engrossing and realistic melodramas set in a plausibly seedy workaday reality. Sarno takes a stab at the vampire horror genre, but alas falls a little short of the mark due to his fumbling inability to craft much in the way of spooky Gothic atmosphere. Fortunately, Sarno does succeed quite well in giving this picture a substantial erotic charge thanks to the pleasing plethora of hot women dancing and cavorting in the buff, gals masturbating with huge phallic candles, sizzling soft-core copulation, equally scorching lesbianism, and the inspired idea of presenting stuffy occult expert Julia Malenkow (a decent performance by the slender and attractive Anke Syring) as a repressed lady with forbidden incestuous longings for her brother. Moreover, the smoldering presences of the luscious Marie Forsa and voluptuous brunette knockout Ulrike Burtz go a long way in compensating for the often sluggish pacing and the European cast having painfully obvious difficulty with the wordy English dialogue. While not one of Sarno's better movies, this flawed outing nonetheless still delivers the satisfying seamy goods and hence qualifies as perfectly acceptable grindhouse fare.