Retro Porn Review - Angel Above - The Devil Below

Obviously inspired by The Exorcist, released a year earlier, Angel Above – The Devil Below is a porn take on horror. Sort of.

The title refers to both sets of lips on a teenage girl named Randy (played by Linda York, known more from sexploitation movies than hardcore). One lonely night, while her mom bangs a repairman in the next room, young Randy occupies herself by masturbating and reading the Necronomicon. You know, usual girly-girl business. The opening credits — with their own accompanying evil pornographic drawings — are shown on the book while she reads attentively.

Of course, while repeating a sexual phrase in Latin, Randy inadvertently summons the devil, who in turn takes residence in her vagina. From that moment on, the devil is in charge of the girl’s pussy, and dominates her impulsive decisions.

The music is pretty good at times, shifting smoothly between really great psychedelic stuff, and a tension-building film score. Although when the plot gets absurd and silly, the music follows and it’s not pretty.

And that’s the thing about this one. The “scary” scenes actually look pretty funny.

To their credit, they owned it. They knew it was playful and tried to just have fun with it. For instance, somehow nobody questioned that this sweet girl’s voice started sounding a lot like a crazy man — not to mention the fact that she wasn’t moving her lips; they just assumed she was talking like that now. Also, in a forced slapstick-y scene with an aspiring politician that came out of nowhere — and added nothing to the story — the movie just kept filling time with more sex; which would be great if those sex scenes were better, or actually focused on being arousing.

Having said all that, seeing the devil’s “mouth” get full with a vibrator so it couldn’t talk was kind of amusing. You could just gag the devil!

There are a few uncomfortable things about the movie, too. Every adult who dealt with Randy seemed particularly comfortable with being pervy and fully ignoring her jailbait status; no attempt to even hide that from her mother! There was also an unnecessary rape scene of Randy’s nurse that we could have lived without.

The acting is pretty bad all around, and really, it’s more of a novelty movie with nudity and graphic sex, but the sex itself isn’t particularly stimulating for the most part.

On paper, this should have been a much better movie. Honestly, what this film shows is that writer John Cutaia and director Dominic Bolla were kind of terrified of vaginas. And surely enough, they never made another porn movie again.

Only watch it if you’re curious, or very, very high.

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