Sinthia: The Devil's Doll (1970)

Sinthia: The Devil's Doll is a 1970 sexploitation feature that promises sex and satanism but delivers something else entirely, something much weirder.

It was directed by Ray Dennis Steckler so you expect an incoherent mess. That’s what you get, but in its own way this movie works remarkably well. Its incoherence becomes a feature rather than a bug.

Cynthia (who becomes Sinthia in her nightmates) is a young woman aged around twenty who has been undergoing therapy. At the age of twelve she murdered both her parents. Due to her age she was not convicted but she did have to undergo therapy. Now her psychiatrist thinks she’s almost cured. There’s just one more step she has to take. It’s the step that will end her disturbing nightmares.

This is a movie that jumbles dreams, fantasies, memories and hallucinations in a wild cocktail. We don’t know where reality leaves off and her dreams begin, because Sinthia herself does not know. We are in effect seeing everything from within the mind of a very disturbed young woman.

Characters seem to change places with each other, because that’s what happens in dreams. Situations merge into other situations, because that’s what happens in dreams. Some of the things we see are Sinthia’s memories, but they may not be reliable. She has gone over certain events in her mind so many times that she can no longer be certain exactly what happened.

Sinthia saw her father having sex with her mother (or possibly her stepmother). Sinthia went crazy with jealousy at the thought that her mother was going to steal Daddy away from her. It’s not unusual for a child to feel possessive towards a parent but there are very definite sexual overtones to her feelings for her daddy.

The problem is that Sinthia was at that age when a girl first starts to become aware of sex and love. Sinthia is clearly bewildered and frightened by her sexual feelings.

After leaving the psychiatrist’s office the 20-year-old Sinthia meets an artist, Lenny. He wants to paint her. She meets several women who seem to take an unusual interest in her.

Lenny takes her to a play. Sinthia takes the play much too seriously and interrupts the performance. This is a play within a film but it could be a play within a dream within a film.

Sinthia may be falling in love with Lenny.

We cannot be sure of the reality of anything that takes place outside the psychiatrist’s office. Some of it might be real. It’s possible that all of it takes place entirely within Sinthia’s mind.

A lot of movies have tried this sort of thing - mixing dream and reality in such a way that the viewer cannot be certain which is which. This movie does it fairly successfully. In fact more successfully than some much more expensive and much more prestigious films.

This movie really does have an incredibly authentic dream feel. Steckler achieves this without fancy special effects (this was an ultra low budget movie) - he uses camera angles, filters, simple superimpositions and rapid-fire editing. Today it would be achieved by spending millions on CGI and the results would almost certainly be less disturbing and less disorienting. You don’t need money, you need imagination and confidence.

It would be easy to take cheap shots at the acting. On the whole it’s very amateurish. That also becomes a feature rather than a bug. These people could be real people, or just characters in a dream, or real people transformed in Sinthia’s mind into dream characters. Sinthia herself could be a character in her own dream. More polished naturalistic performance would have weakened the spooky dream feel.

There’s no actual satanism, although Sinthia does have nightmares about being claimed by the Devil for her wickedness.

There’s a huge amount of nudity, but this is a story all about sex. All of Sinthia’s fears and guilts, and all of her dreams and fantasies, come back to sex. Surprisingly, given subject matter that would terrify a filmmaker of today, the movie doesn’t feel sleazy. It doesn’t even feel exploitative. It is honest and open about sexual feelings, and that in itself would have filmmakers of today running for cover.

This is a sexploitation movie with at least some serious purpose and with some arty pretensions.

What makes it worth seeing is that Steckler has no real idea of what he’s doing. As I said at the beginning it’s an incoherent mess but it fails in such interesting ways. Its faults (directorial ineptitude and terrible acting) end up making it feel like a genuine nightmare. Nightmares don’t make sense. They don’t mean anything. They’re just there. A more competent director would have taken this material and turned it into something intelligent and provocative. But that wouldn’t have worked. A nightmare is like a horror movie directed by an insane child. They couldn’t find an insane child to direct this movie but they found Ray Dennis Steckler which is the next best thing.

So many sexploitation movies survive in the form of a single release print often in very poor condition. That’s clearly the case here. Don’t expect a pristine transfer, just be grateful that such a fascinating oddity survived at all.

Something Weird paired this one with Satanis: The Devil’s Mass on a double-feature DVD that is now hard to find. It’s also available on Blu-Ray from Severin in a Ray Dennis Steckler boxed set.

Sinthia: The Devil's Doll is weird but it’s weird in a really interesting way and it’s highly recommended.