Satan ~ The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain (1916)
But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most, our one fellow and brother who most needed a friend yet had not a single one, the one sinner among us all who had the highest and clearest right to every Christian's daily and nightly prayers, for the plain and unassailable reason that his was the first and greatest need, he being among sinners the supremest?
~ Mark Twain's Autobiography
Best Cinema Satans
Portrayed by: A Huge Rotating Cylinder of Green Goo.
Film: Prince Of Darkness
Leave it to John Carpenter to give us a vision of Satan we've never seen before. Not content with the standard issue red skinned man with pitchfork tail and horny crown, John apparently thought about it a moment and mused: "Hmmm, what is the exact opposite of that?" Hence, a large glass cylinder sitting in a church basement for a thousand years, filled with a thick, snotty, viscous green fluid eternally whirling like an angry tornado, just waiting for the right time to spring a leak and squirt itself violently all over the faces of the dumb people who wander down to look at it all alone with their mouths wide open.
Portrayed by: Wahab Chaudhry
Film: The VVitch
Goats are the anti-unicorns. Even Peter S. Beagle knew that much, and said as much in his book The Last Unicorn: “She did not look anything like a horned horse, as unicorns are often pictured, being smaller and cloven-hoofed, and possessing that oldest, wildest grace that horses have never had, that deer have only in a shy, thin imitation and goats in dancing mockery.” Goats know they aren't graceful and they don't give a shit. They're having fun, bouncing around springloaded, their every bleat sounding like a child's expletive. Baby goats are sweet, happy little creatures. Full grown billy goats are another entity all together; they may allow you to pet and play with them, or they may turn and headbutt you into oblivion with those incredibly hard horns. You never know what you're going to get, and a lot of it depends on how you treat the goat. Challenge one, asserting your Alpha Male dominance in its face and you run the risk of watching your intestines spill out of your stomach like blood sausages. Respect it, sing its praises, and you'll be enjoying thick spreads of creamy butter on your bread for all eternity.
Portrayed by: Maynard James Keenan
Film: Bikini Bandits
Hey, if you're going to play Satan on a budget, you may as well go whole hog. Paint your skin red and don the horns, by all means. But don't forget the black leather butt floss, the bowling ball sized testicles and a Howitzer sized cock whose length and circumference almost match Keenan's own height and width. Maynard plays it perfect, trying and failing to be shocking, his lecherousness a caricature of horny, sock-fapping teenage boy hormones. He seems completely at ease in his extensive get-up, as well he should be considering the vast array of body paints, wigs and totally unsexy K-Mart underwear he usually wears onstage with Tool. Satan has become mediocre, the sins of his sinners having surpassed him. But he's not giving up and still has one more ace up his sleeve. He's the fucking man, after all. And if he's the fucking man then you're the fucking man as well, buddy.
Portrayed by: Tim Curry
Film: Legend
I love this film. I really do. As long as it's on mute once the actual talking starts. The dialogue is atrocious, like Billy Shakespeare threw up all over a basketful of marshmallow Peeps. The visuals are stunning, perfect in every way. The costumes are sugar spun magic incarnate. The music by Tangerine Dream is marzipan ecstasy. As long as I fast forward through the scenes that feature Tom Cruise's huge, toothy, pancake-smashed-with-a-boulder sized face, it's a pretty good film. And lets be real. We were all kinda hoping that Mia Sara would dump that goony, bath-mat wearing nature boy and stay in the castle with Darkness, clad in her vampiric black wedding dress, wearing blinding diamonds and looking for all the world like a lead singer for some funereal English mid 80s goth band. Darkness might be evil, but hey - he's besotted with Lily and would clearly give her anything in the world she could wish for. Considering her daddy is a king, she probably would have been given to him at some point anyway to secure fertile farm lands in Hell.
Portrayed by: Viggo Mortensen
Film: The Prophecy
Not the best movie, but it has enough going for it to make it worth a watch. Mostly Christopher Walken as a sleazy, used car salesman version of the Archangel Gabriel, who has grown tired of God's pious bullshit and descends to earth looking to start a war. The story ultimately doesn't make a lot of sense, but you're mostly watching it for the cast anyway, so who cares? And in the role of Lucifer, the most beautiful of all God's angels, cast down to earth for his refusal to bow before man, is an unknown (at the time) actor named Viggo Mortensen. Every bit as sleazy as Walken's angel, Mortensen still manages to impart some grace and class into his performance. He hates people and makes no secret of the fact that he'd like to violate their corpses, but he doesn't feel the need to be crass about it. He's as cool as the proverbial cucumber...until he senses he's losing and then turns into a pathetic, crying child, begging for love.
Portrayed by: Peter Stormare
Film: Constantine
God I hated this movie. So dull, so pretentious, so full of Keanu Reeves. But sometimes, all a film needs is one amazing moment with one incredible actor transforming a ten minute role into the film's most memorable scene. Peter Storemare - a bland, Crisco colored lump of a man was born to play a bad guy, and did so many times, perhaps most notably in Fargo and Jurassic Park...uh, part 2 I think? So naturally, the time came for him to play the greatest bad guy the world has ever known, and Stormare did it in a sharp white suit with a flippant, mocking attitude, clearly disgusted by Reeves self sacrificing martyrdom and heroic proclamations.
Film: Fantasia
Set to the strains of Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, the gargoyle-like, winged devil known here as Chernobog rises mountain like above a small, Eastern European village in the hours between midnight and dawn, acting as a conductor for the dead. He choreographs the dancing ghosts, summons the witches and revels in the storm of damnation like a gleeful child opening presents on Christmas morning. Until the dawn comes and sends him shrinking back, grey and afraid, into the shadows once more. You gotta feel just a wee bit sorry for him. "Okay Chernobog, put your toys away, it's time for church, young man!"
Portrayed by: Benjamin Christensen
Film: Haxan
I admit, it's been years since I sat down and watched this film, but the one scene that stayed with me was the shot of horny ol' Satan, frantically churning butter in a dark corner. Not that I'm implying anything at all Freudian with this shot...although I do have the urge to offer the guy a box of Kleenex for later.
Portrayed by: Tom Waits
Film: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
Tom Waits, much like Maynard James Keenan, was born to play Satan, or rather Mr. Nick as he is known here in the film The Imaginarium Of Dr. Parnassus. Famous for being the last film of a doomed Heath Ledger, everyone seems to have forgotten that Tom Fucking Waits was in here too, playing a patient devil, eagerly awaiting the day when Lily Cole will be all his, because Christopher Plummer sold his soul in exchange for another Lily Cole and...well, it's all a bit confusing. But Waits pulls it off with slick enthusiasm, his lazy half smile and casual swagger the very definition of Satan Is Waitin.
Portrayed by: Terrance Zdunich
Film: The Devil's Carnival
I really didn't like this movie. I liked parts of it. I liked the idea of it. But I was never a fan of Aesop's Fables and ultimately this film was just too eagerly hateful for me. However, I did love Terrance Zdunich's devil makeup and his climactic song "Grace For Sale" which is so loud and rebellious and blasphemous that it sends God into a frenzy up in Heaven, much the same way the neighbors crappy rap music makes me want to burn down the entire street I live on some days.
"I raise my hell, my cane, my stakes, my snakes
Tongues, tongues, slither in the mud; that's how a carnival grows, my son.
Tongues, tongues, slither in the psalms; that's how a carnival grows!"
And last but not least of all the evil in all the world...
Honorable Mention:
No comments:
Post a Comment