Satan's Little Helper (2004)


Satan's Little Helper is, to date, the last feature film from cult director Jeff Lieberman.  If the name doesn't sound familiar, then movies like the Just Before Dawn, Remote Control and that Saturday morning staple Squirm should jog the memory.  His movies may not be masterpieces but they have a weird, sometimes sick, quirkiness and dark sense of humor to them.  This one is no exception.

Douglas Whooly (Alexander Brickel) is a young boy obsessed with the video game Satan's Little Helper, in which the title character goes around killing people in the name of Satan and sending them to hell for his master while trying to avoid getting in trouble with God.  His mother Merrill (Amanda Plummer) indulges his obsession.  He is looking forward to his sister Jenna (Katheryn Winnick) coming home to spend Halloween, but is upset when she brings along her new boyfriend Alex (Stephen Graham).  To bond, Alex decides to go trick-or-treating with Douglas as Satan.

Problem is Douglas has already found his Satan (Joshua Annex).  When he sees a man in a devil costume dragging a body onto a lawn he thinks it is just pretend.  However, it turns out that he is actually a vicious serial killer.  Doug befriends him and asks him to get rid of Alex, which he does, and then proceeds to take Doug on his rounds to kill a number of other people in town.  It is only when Doug realizes it's not a game do things become even worse. 

The movie has a good concept and avoids that cheap feel that the film may have had in other hands.  It is still obvious that there wasn't a huge budget, but Lieberman is good at pinching the pennies and putting the money on the screen.  The Satan costume looks great and some of the kills are brutal.  However, I could have done without a cat getting killed.

The problem is Douglas.  Not Alexander Brickel who plays him, but the way the kid is written.  He is a special kind of stupid that, toward the end, defies all belief.  I can understand a young, imaginative boy that retreats into fantasy because he has no real friends, but I can't fathom someone like Doug existing without his mother knowing she is going to be a permanent caretaker.  Not that his mother or sister are that much brighter, but at least they catch on to what is happening. 

With the repeated beats of Douglas constantly falling for the killer's ruses, things just get annoying and the movie drags on a bit too long.  There is an excellent sequence where the killer crashes a Halloween party, but after that there should have been a denouement one way or the other.  This is where the budget shows as the town they live in is supposed to be going crazy due to the killer offing the police force causing all sorts of chaos.  The scale that is needed to get this across just isn't there.

It's a fun concept and the killer is sufficiently frightening.  This just needed to wrap things up a bit better to really bring it home at the end. 

Satan's Little Helper (2004)
Time: 96 minutes
Starring: Alexander Brickel, Katheryn Winnick, Stephen Graham, Amanda Plummer, Joshua Annex
Director: Jeff Lieberman

 

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