Satan is Good, Satan is our pal: Musing on My Sweet Satan
The party is in full swing by the time you arrive. You sink into the brown couch whose floral pattern is all but a memory buried by stains. Facing the TV a tattooed hand passes you a lukewarm Coors. The sound it makes as you crack the can open is the sound of salvation. It's the starting gun for the weekend, the horsemen of the apocalypse cresting a hill that is the promise of a ruthless hangover. Inside that cylinder is foamy piss, but after eight or so and some whiskey from a plastic handle that urine becomes jet fuel for chaos. On the grainy screen in front of you a woman's eyes are being gouged out by crows sent courtesy of the antichrist. The sound has been muted so the soundtrack is the mixtape currently testing the bass capacity of the boombox sitting in a corner. Venom becomes King Diamond and King's laugh follows the now blind woman into traffic as she's run down. Damien: The Omen 2 is a snoozer but the kills are a riot. Next is a scene of a young man held down in front of a drill press, the swirling bit getting closer and closer to his pale temple.
Keller made this compilation VHS, the third in a painstakingly curated series he has titled "Gore Cult." Keller is the entropy of the universe made flesh and clothed in a torn Suffocation shirt. He holds court at these parties due to equal parts intimidation and charisma, the soul of a Mongolian warlord trapped in a twenty year old occult-obsessed metalhead. The VHS ends on the scene in Portrait of A Serial Killer where Henry and Otis are watching their killing and Otis tells Henry that he wants to see it again. He's rewinding a VCR and then the image cuts to snow. Cute. A few beers later and you're with a group trekking down to the woods, to "The Altar." You have no Ricky Kasso... But you do have a Jimmy Karnstein.
Jimmy Karnstein who lived in a clapboard shack behind his parent's trailer, the inside plastered with Penthouse centerfolds and blacklight grim reaper posters. It was Jimmy who sold you decent weed and insisted every dime bag have a sigil of lucifer painstakingly drawn on it in sharpie marker. Then one night Jimmy Karnstein went down to the spot in the woods that you are walking towards now. He lay his little sister down on the slab of stone that was all but made to be an altar and raised a buck knife, uttering words in a tongue that was long thought dead. The cops reduced Karnstein to hamburger before he could bring that knife down. As he choked on his own blood, one cop said he roared out that he would return. Take a story like that and let it ferment in the suburban soil nurtured by paranoid mothers and morbid heshers and it becomes something feral.
Now around the altar, Ozzy is barking at the moon and his voice warbles as the cassette strains. You hoot and holler and stomp, motorcycle boots grinding platoons of dead leaves into moist earth. Keller leaps onto the stone slab, capering like a demon on a woodcut. Maybe he'll come back tonight, urged on by your revels. Out of the void a pale hand will emerge, fingers clad in biker rings, gripping a buck knife as tightly in rebirth as it did in death. Maybe one of you will be the lamb, blood blackened by moonlight dripping into the cracks on the stone altar like molten metal into a forgers mold. The Beatles had it wrong. All you need is blood.
In twenty minutes, My Sweet Satan packs in more grime and human cruelty than a hundred carefully curated and self-aggrandizing mega studio meditations on "alternative" youth. An adaptation of the Ricky Kasso story (Which was napalm for those who concocted the Satanic panic of the eighties), the short film is bookended by the Acid King's (Dubbed Kasslin here) suicide in his jail cell. The claustrophobic space in between is reserved for focusing in on splintered moments that illustrates the world he lived in, the company he kept and the demons that clawed restlessly at the inside of his skull. Jim Van Bebber creates a combat boots on the ground feeling throughout the runtime and Ricky's flaring moments of rage feel like a madman teasing a flowing gasoline pump with his lighter. The climax in the woods as Gary Larsen is slain has no comedown. The taking of his life is unbridled viciousness, existing only for the pleasure of the guttural voices that haunt the soundscape of the movie. There is so much texture here and all of it will leave your fingers stained red.
-Dr. Benny Graves
