having the evil turn out to be some old Colonel Sanders looking guy sitting on a thrown in the basement killed it.Up until that point it was ok.
shareI don't know about that. Victor Buono, who played that Satan-ish character, had a history of playing Sydney Greenstreet type villains. I thought he projected a sense of evil from the start, before he grew horns (though I'll admit the horns were pretty cheesy)
shareAt least the movie doesn't cop out, but rather plainly reveals the source of "the evil." C.J. Arnold (Crenna) is a respected and successful psychologist who said he made jokes about the concept of God and the devil at cocktail parties. The climax has him come face-to-face with the awful truth.
Of course they could've depicted satan in an entirely different way -- like the conventional manner, e.g. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089469/mediaviewer/rm3471862272/ -- but they evidently didn't have the budget to pull it off. So they went with the alternative white room/mist/Colonel Sanders depiction. Either way, it is the prince of darkness.