["Satan's Brew"] is a deliberate slap in the face…. [Walter Kranz] operates from the same feckless, uninhibited, unscrupulous, and unpredictable position that Fassbinder does in hurling this movie at us. The film creates an irritable weather all its own. People behave like cross morons, pretend to less intelligence than they actually have, move with the gestures of wooden puppets on tangled strings. (p. 62)

Fassbinder has made this shock-the-middlebrow picture go at a rattling pace, piling on evil comic details to see how much we will take…. Fassbinder forever pits words against physical expressiveness in this film, and throws sense out of joint…. Fassbinder has given himself the license to go haywire, perhaps in the interests of testing our endurance while we are having a sadomasochistic charade thrown at us like so much mud. Spattered and spluttering, we must be prepared to roll with the punch. Exceptional talent—and...