Susan Lucci is the Devil? She could be in this horror movie directed for television by none other than Wes Craven. Possible image-enhancing surgery aside, being the Devil might explain how Lucci looks quite similar today, thirty years later to her earlier self from 1984. Such as it is though, Lucci is actually all right in the role and there is nothing in the film to actually say she is ‘the’ Devil. She could just be a demon, though whatever the case, she attempts and succeeds in bewitching the townsfolk with her feminine wiles to join her club where initiation essentially costs you your soul. Only one man is able to resist, one Matt Winslow played by Robert Urich and he wonders why nobody else can see that there is something phony with the Steaming Springs Country Club and its proprietor.

For a television film, Craven delivers and while there is nothing especially frightening about it except perhaps the intensity that Lucci exudes on occasion or the blind devotion and mindless servitude that the residents show, it still manages to entertain though as more of a thriller than anything else. Urich is good, he generally was in anything he ever did and it was good to see him doing something a little different as he often seemed to take safer roles like the character he will most probably be remembered by – Spenser, who was always for hire. While the movie was not altogether that good, it was not all that terrible either, just middle of the road if one had to classify it, but Urich would rise above the material – just a little, and adds enough tension to it that you wanted to see what would happen between him and Lucci.

The film is filled with the usual thematic elements you would expect to see in movie Craven would slap his name on like life and death, love, lust and more and all get explored in some fashion until that big finale where Urich goes to rescue his family from the depths of Hell. The special effects left a little to be desired at times, but considering it was a television movie from 1984, it was not all that bad. What would have been nice to see was a little more horror injected into the picture and perhaps a little more reasoning behind Lucci’s motivations – not that it was not readily apparent already.

Again, Invitation to Hell was not especially bad but neither was it especially great. If you manage to give it a watch, it will provide you with a way to kill some time, but it is nothing you will ever want to watch or think to watch twice.

2.5 out of 5