One of my more vivid memories of childhood is looking through the movie ads in the daily newspaper, because they were always designed to be as eye-catching and, in the case of horror films at least, as lurid as possible. Promising all kinds of truly horrific sights, my still-developing brain hadn’t yet learned to take things with a grain of salt, and the visuals in the ads would send my imagination into overdrive. A few of those films stuck in my brain and since I’ve become an amateur horror film enjoyer, every now and then I’ve taken it on myself to check them out, to see if the reality could come anywhere near living up to my childhood expectations. I mean, the answer is no. It’s always going to be no, because the imagination conjures far worse things than film does most of the time and I had a really vivid imagination as a kid. Maybe one of them has come close, but that’s it.
The Devil’s Rain, then, is another instance of me indulging a curiosity from childhood and this one’s probably the least frightening of the bunch. It’s not really a good movie by any metric - it’s borderline comic in places, featuring a cast that makes it even harder for viewers of a certain age to take it seriously, but it does have its moments.
It opens, without music, on credits laid over selections from Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, pretty well-established shorthand for “this is going to be about hell” at this point. That leads into, well, a dark and stormy night. No, really. It’s pitch-black and the rain is absolutely pelting down. Inside her house, Emma Preston stares fretfully out the window, worried about her husband Steve, who’s out there somewhere. Her son Mark tries to reassure her, but she says something about how all of this is happening just as she saw it. So that’s odd. And soon enough, Steve’s truck pulls up in front of the house, and he gets out. But he doesn’t come inside, he just stands out there. He tells Emma that someone named Corbis wants a book that she has in her possession, and to come to Redstone - a deserted mining town nearby - with it.
And then the thing that was her husband dissolves into a puddle of slime.
Why is she a psychic? As it turns out, it’s mostly a narrative device to explain Corbis’ whole history with the Preston family and to drive the characters from one location to another. Mark goes to Redstone, and then Tom and Julie follow when she gets a horrible vision about what’s happening to Mark, so really it’s sort of a movie about the members of a single family taking a trip from their homestead to an abandoned mining town and discovering that whoops, there’s an evil cult there. That sounds kind of reductive, but at least until the end of the film, that’s really kind of it. The acting’s mostly melodramatic, and the dialogue (especially in the confrontation between Mark and Corbis) is pretty purple and overblown. It’s not an easy film to take seriously.
And this isn’t helped by what are obvious budgetary limitations. The whole thing takes place in a couple of locations, one of which is an abandoned mining town, which is where the film spends most of its time. The stunt work is not the most convincing I’ve ever seen (a car plows into a tree at maybe 0.5 miles per hour, a tumble down some stairs might be the gentlest I’ve ever seen on film), and the practical effects work ranges from the surprisingly effective to the downright laughable. And the cast is full of people who were, as another review put it, either on their way up in their career or on their way down. If you were a kid in the 1970s or 80s, the majority of this cast is going to be very, very familiar to you from various films and television shows of the era. And it’s not their fault, but their familiarity does detract from any atmosphere this film might have at any point. At least two or three of them are so well-identified with other characters or shows that it’s difficult in the modern day to see them as any other character. You should be going “oh shit,” but instead you’re going “hey, it’s that guy!”
It's not all bad – the opening is pretty strong, the character of Corbis is surprisingly sinister, there are some genuinely creepy moments sprinkled throughout, and the climax makes up for the lack of action beforehand by being as deliriously gooey as Lucio Fulci at his best. There’s some potential camp value to the film having had Anton LaVey as a technical consultant, but the film itself isn’t really that campy. As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that I’d love to basically see the satanic cult version of Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, and this ain’t it.
It might seem unfair, like I’m holding this film to modern standards that it has no chance of meeting. But this came out after The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and before Halloween, so in context it really does seem like an example of the sort of thing that horror was beginning to outgrow. And it doesn’t help that it doesn’t have the relentless eeriness of another low-budget film about cult goings-on from around the same time, Messiah of Evil. Between its overall clumsiness and its cast, I think this one hasn’t aged so well. Not in the cultural sense, there’s nothing objectionable about it, really, it’s just difficult to take seriously. This is one for watching with some friends and some beers.
IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon (this is available on Blu Ray? WTF?)
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