Soul Snatcher

      Poor Kathy (DIANE WEBSTER). Unemployed, she mopes around a Queens apartment while her two sexy roommates pursue the wild, exciting world of nude modeling. (Roommate DARLENE BENNETT -- perhaps the most ubiquitous face in Sixties skinflicks -- even paints naked pictures while an electric fan happily blows up her dress!) Kathy wants to be a nude model too -- Oops! Make that a “photographer’s model” -- but no one will hire her. As narrator JOEL HOLT grimly informs us, “New York was proving to be a giant asphalt prison with no escape in sight.” Worse, an invisible devil dude (FRED DENNIE) starts hanging around the apartment. Dressed in tails and tux, the “Bearer of Evil” (aka “The Bearer of False Promises”) leers at the girls and follows Kathy around while snickering and raising his eyebrows. (He looks like a stage magician or a particularly dapper TV horror host.)
      Things abruptly change at a typical Saturday night makeout party between the photographers and models -- complete with topless dancing, and Darlene’s real-life twin sister DAWN BENNETT joining in the festivities. Kathy sits forlornly on the side until that devil guy suddenly appears through the modern miracle of a jump cut. He promises to give her anything she wants. “He’ll make her the most popular girl at all the affairs! She’ll be wanted by all of the men! He guarantees her fun, excitement, love, romance, and success in business!” And what must she do in return? Why, she must wear “a special pair of gold shoes,” that’s all. (Who knew Satan had a shoe fetish?) She agrees and her life suddenly becomes “wonderful.” Cary, one of the photographers who had earlier rejected her for a job, even becomes her boyfriend!
      Unfortunately, her super-glamorous life comes to an abrupt halt one horrible day when she actually takes the damn shoes off. (Which begs some obvious questions. Was she sleeping in them? Showering with them on? Didn’t they stink by now?) Suddenly -- Poof! -- The Devil reappears to claim her as his own....
      Shot silent in 16mm and drenched in wall-to-wall library music, The Soul Snatcher is almost a typical mid-Sixties nudie except, of course, this one has Satan popping in and out of scenes like a goofy Georges Méliès effect. All of which is made even sillier with Holt’s utterly deadpan narration. (You’ll recognize Holt’s voice from White Slaves of Chinatown and Olga’s House of Shame. He also directed and stars in Karate Hand of Death.) Time, of course, changes everything. Yesterday, The Soul Snatcher was a “dirty movie”: smut; filth; the porno of the Sixties; the kind of film decent people didn’t go see; a cinematic assault so crude that it could only play in theaters ghettoized into showing Adults-Only films. Today, however, it almost looks like a children’s film. But that’s also The Soul Snatcher’s dubious charm -- an antique relic from the weird and wacky days of the Nudie Cuties.
      From the original 35mm devil-made-her-do-it negative. -- Frank Henenlotter