Everything Is Terrible! Presents: The Great Satan is a collection of Found Footage tapes, where over 2000 forgotten VHS tapes have been used and re-contextualized in order to tell a different story: one about Satan himself. Everything Is Terrible is an artist collective based in Los Angeles, which was founded in 2007 by a group of friends who met each other while attending Ohio University. They’ve made several videos of this kind, consisting of VHS tapes which they found in all kinds of places: apparently they’ve searched thrift stores, garage sales and bargain bins for these kinds of videos. One of their most popular videos is called So Your Cat Wants a Massage, which is an instructional video designed to show people how to massage a cat…and while it’s only about three minutes long there’s so many hilarious golden one-liners in this oddball of a video!
If you know beforehand what kind of movies Everything Is Terrible have made over the years, then you’ll probably be aware of the sheer absurdity The Great Satan has to show you. What I found quite amazing with The Great Satan is how every clip, despite knowing they’re not really connected, are still put together and edited in such a way that everything just feels like it’s belonging together with the rest. Prior to watching it I kind of expected it to be an incoherent jumble of random clips, but instead it’s all presented as a hilarious religious satire. There’s a ton of micro clips that’s taking you through a trip of the 80’s and 90’s, that have been stitched together into something that’s trying to make you feel drugged while sober. There are clips from religious children’s TV shows, TV preachers, commercials, obscure low-budget movies and so on and so forth. The end result is highly experimental and psychedelic. There are movies where you sometimes recommend the viewer to “shut their brain off“…but during this movie your brain will more likely feel the need to sprout wings and fly away. I can only imagine how it would feel to watch this under the influence of drugs. I’m sure the shroom trippers would have a good time.
There are many elements of pure comedy here, mostly due to the juxtaposition of movie clips and dialogue, but also due to some of the clips themselves. There are clips from several movies, mostly horror and also some relatively unknown and low-budget ones. Some of the religious children’s shows that are shown here are actually on the funnily-creepy spectrum, where you almost think this must have been a parody of some kind, only to remember that yup – a lot of those shows were thoroughly fucked up, and might possibly, and ironically, be the scariest elements in this entire film. God Bless.
The Great Satan is a funny mishmash of madness and absurdities, a wacky recontextualization based on the ideology of the Satanic Panic and people’s fears of how the Great Satan will corrupt and conquer all. It’s a little over an hour of full madness, just make sure your mind is prepared for it.
Directors: Lehr Beidelschies, Dimitri Simakis, Nic Maier
Country & year: USA, 2018
Also known as: Everything Is Terrible! Presents: The Great Satan
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7493854/
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