YMMV / The Touch of Satan

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• Designated Hero: Jodie is about as inert a protagonist as ever appeared on film. While it's implied that Melissa magically summoned him to the farm, it's harder to explain why he remains there long after it's clear he's dealing with people who, at the very least, have a few screws loose. Jodie does literally nothing of his own volition until his Deal with the Devil in the climax, which dooms both him and Melissa to eternal damnation.
• Narm:
  • "This is where the fish lives."
  • "ZAH!"
  • "D'oh, look at the blood..."
  • The dissolve cut from a farmer being murdered with a pitchfork and his barn catching fire to the Stricklands laughing around the dinner table. The MST3K version goes with both the best and only joke you could possibly make:
    Crow: "...and then he died! Ha ha!"
• Padding: The movie is a lot longer than it needed to be, with scenes of driving and walking stretched out and frequent pauses in the dialogue which are repeatedly pointed on in the MST3K commentary.
• Retroactive Recognition: The film's cinematographer, Jordan Cronenweth, would work on much better movies than this in the future, including classics like Blade Runner and Stop Making Sense.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The basic storyline and ending twist would likely have made for a halfway decent episode of The Twilight Zone (1959) or The Outer Limits (1963), but as a full-length movie (and an ineptly written one at that), it quickly falls apart.

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