The Devil's Rain (1975)


One thing I was wondering while watching this movie is why anyone would want to worship Satan if they still have to go to church to do it.  Even when I was a Christian church was a rare thing unless there was a pastor who could make the service interesting.  Not a full-on band singing trite worship songs interesting, but at least a sermon with a point.  Like most of the lectures I had to sit through The Devil's Rain has no point and, unfortunately, a tendency to put one to sleep as well.  This should not happen in a movie with both Ernest Borgnine and William Shatner along with Anton La Vey as a consultant. 

During a deluge in the desert Emma Preston (Ida Lupino) is afraid something has happened to her husband.  Her son Mark (Shatner) returns home and tries to reassure her, but those assurances fall short when his father shows up, eyeless, and melts like wax in the rain.  While Mark is briefly gone his house is ransacked, their servant John (Woodrow Chambliss) wounded and mother kidnaped. 

This is at the behest of a man named Jonathan Corbis (Borgnine), who is searching for a book in the Prestons' possession.  Corbis is the leader of a Satanic cult that originally existed in the 1600s.  Despite being burned alive he has returned, moving the church with him, and aims to use the book to send his disciples to Hell as promised.  Part of this process is possessing bodies with the spirits of his original followers.  When Mark's brother Tom (Tom Skerritt) becomes aware of this, he and his psychic wife Julie (Joan Prather) travel the ghost town where Corbis has set up shop to put an end to his plans.

Among other recognizable actors this also has Eddie Albert in a small role as a professor friend of Tom's as well as La Vey as one of Corbis's high priests, albeit hidden behind a helmet.  John Travolta also shows up in a small role as one of Corbis's disciples.  Despite La Vey's involvement this is pretty much a typical Satanic cult movie from the time, just not a good one.  The Satanists are still the villains, but La Vey was always more of a huckster than a true believer in the occult. 

The main problem with the movie is that it makes little sense.  This wouldn't be so bad if it was something like The Day the World Ended which at least has some interesting miniature and stop motion work, but the main claim to fame in this is Borgnine's demon makeup and the melting figures at the end.  Problem is, the way Corbis shows up in his true form is unintentionally funny, while the melting scenes go on forever as there probably wasn't enough movie otherwise.

What is also sad is that this was directed by Robert Fuest who did The Abominable Dr. Phibes and its sequel, both movies worthy of the cult status they have achieved.  The Devil's Rain also has its following but not for the same reasons, and this movie relegated Fuest to television the rest of his life.  This could have been interesting, and both Shatner and Borgnine give it their all, but there just isn't enough here to hold one's attention or make one care about what is going on.  

The Devil's Rain (1975)
Time: 86 minutes
Starring: Ernest Borgnine, William Shatner, Tom Skerritt, Joan Prather
Director: Robert Fuest


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)

Image
Jaws was one of the first big blockbusters and a number of studios spent the rest of the 1970s making cheap knockoffs of it.  However, there are only so many times that one can have an oversized predator (or swarm of them) attacking tourists and locals as a major event comes up before people get bored.  However, it seems they never got bored of seeing animals get their own against humans, whether those creatures be normal or supersized.  The "nature attacks" films pretty much were their own subgenre and, as in any, they were of varying quality, from amazing to amazingly bad.  Kingdom of the Spiders falls somewhere in the middle. When Walter Colby's (Woody Strode) prize calf suddenly dies local veterinarian 'Rack' Hansen (William Shatner) sends samples of the animal's blood to a lab in Flagstaff to have it examined.  The results are sent to Arizona State University, where an expert in entomology named Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling) travels to the town of Camp ...
Read more

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's...
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman'...
Read more