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If you decide to watch Devil Story because of how cool the monster looks on the poster , I regret to inform you that you've been grossly misled. While the monster in the movie does wear the same Nazi uniform (something which is never explained in the movie, for the record), his general appearance is less like the wild-eyed decaying zombie suggested by the poster and more like beloved actor Peter Boyle, star of such classics as Taxi Driver, Young Frankenstein and Joe. (I guess Boyle did play an undead character in Young Frankenstein, but his appearance there was more dignified.) Just an ugly, unappealing sonofabitch with a complexion that can be charitably described as scrotal, who spends the entire movie making Chewbacca-esque growls, spewing blood from his puckered lips and doing an ungainly shuffle.
Luckily the movie compensates with the introduction of a mummy, in proper bandaged form (although his outfit looks suspiciously like a bodysuit with a bandage print; this is a low budget production and I assume they had to cut corners somewhere). The mummy is even revealed to have a cute nose when some of his bandages are torn off his face, and he has a girlfriend who steps out of a sarcophagus with intimidating helmet hair. If you're one to take your romantic advice from horror movies, you might be inspired to find someone who looks at you the way these characters look at each other: the mummy, drooling blue liquid, and his girlfriend, returning his gaze with a blank, affectless stare.
As for the plot...oh dear. Peter Boyle kills a few people in the middle of the woods in a series of extremely limp gore scenes, and then the heroine and her plus one stop in the middle of the road for the movie's first real freakout. Angry, jittery synths fill the soundtrack, lightning strikes in broad daylight, and we keep cutting away to a cat until it leaps on the heroine's face. Or maybe it doesn't. (Is the cat real? We will never know.) Anyway, they stop by a manor during a storm and decide to spend the night, and are regaled by one of the inhabitants by a story about a shipwreck containing cargo from Egypt. For some reason in the middle of the night that same character runs outside with a shotgun and tries to kill a horse. The heroine decides to follow and ends up running into not just Peter Boyle, but the mummy and his lady friend as well. (The man is presumably a member of the French equivalent of the NRA, as when the heroine asks her to use his rifle, he angrily corrects her: "It's a shotgun, lady!")
This a real brain fryer of a movie, where minutes stretch seemingly stretch into hours, a fuzzy synth sizzles on the soundtrack, plot points bear little relation to each other, and narrative coherence melts along with your brain if you try to think about any of it too hard. (Crack an egg open and get a nice breakfast going.) The scene where the man tries to kill the horse is a perfect example. The man is stranded in the middle of the screen, firing in all directions. The horse gallops from one side of the screen to another, as if nowhere near the man. The man is cloaked in the dead of night, the horse is framed against the dawn sky. These two appear to be nowhere near each other, not even in the same time of day, and possibly not in the same reality, an accidental surrealism arising from the ragged visual continuity.
This must have been especially maddening to see in the VHS era, with different sequences playing like your VCR malfunctioned and started to loop over the same few minutes and skip the odd moment, like a showdown between Peter Boyle and the horse that has him repeatedly knocked back by the horse's kick (despite it clearly making no contact) and scream in pain endlessly with a chunk of skull dangling off his bloodied forehead. The horse raises its legs. Boyle falls back and shrieks. Flesh and bone dangle in close-up. Rinse. Repeat. It goes without saying that none of this is remotely scary, although the movie achieve a certain goofy rhythm. Setting it in the French countryside also gives it a pretty distinct texture, albeit one not conducive to building dread. (American forests seem like a natural environment for mad slashers, French forests make you want to go on a weekend getaway to a chateau.) There's also a touch of class with the use of some Bach on the soundtrack, likely because it''s in the public domain.
So is this any good? I don't know, but there are worse ways to kill seventy five minutes.
Devil Story (Launois 1986)
If you decide to watch Devil Story because of how cool the monster looks on the poster , I regret to inform you that you've been grossly misled. While the monster in the movie does wear the same Nazi uniform (something which is never explained in the movie, for the record), his general appearance is less like the wild-eyed decaying zombie suggested by the poster and more like beloved actor Peter Boyle, star of such classics as Taxi Driver, Young Frankenstein and Joe. (I guess Boyle did play an undead character in Young Frankenstein, but his appearance there was more dignified.) Just an ugly, unappealing sonofabitch with a complexion that can be charitably described as scrotal, who spends the entire movie making Chewbacca-esque growls, spewing blood from his puckered lips and doing an ungainly shuffle.
Luckily the movie compensates with the introduction of a mummy, in proper bandaged form (although his outfit looks suspiciously like a bodysuit with a bandage print; this is a low budget production and I assume they had to cut corners somewhere). The mummy is even revealed to have a cute nose when some of his bandages are torn off his face, and he has a girlfriend who steps out of a sarcophagus with intimidating helmet hair. If you're one to take your romantic advice from horror movies, you might be inspired to find someone who looks at you the way these characters look at each other: the mummy, drooling blue liquid, and his girlfriend, returning his gaze with a blank, affectless stare.
As for the plot...oh dear. Peter Boyle kills a few people in the middle of the woods in a series of extremely limp gore scenes, and then the heroine and her plus one stop in the middle of the road for the movie's first real freakout. Angry, jittery synths fill the soundtrack, lightning strikes in broad daylight, and we keep cutting away to a cat until it leaps on the heroine's face. Or maybe it doesn't. (Is the cat real? We will never know.) Anyway, they stop by a manor during a storm and decide to spend the night, and are regaled by one of the inhabitants by a story about a shipwreck containing cargo from Egypt. For some reason in the middle of the night that same character runs outside with a shotgun and tries to kill a horse. The heroine decides to follow and ends up running into not just Peter Boyle, but the mummy and his lady friend as well. (The man is presumably a member of the French equivalent of the NRA, as when the heroine asks her to use his rifle, he angrily corrects her: "It's a shotgun, lady!")
This a real brain fryer of a movie, where minutes stretch seemingly stretch into hours, a fuzzy synth sizzles on the soundtrack, plot points bear little relation to each other, and narrative coherence melts along with your brain if you try to think about any of it too hard. (Crack an egg open and get a nice breakfast going.) The scene where the man tries to kill the horse is a perfect example. The man is stranded in the middle of the screen, firing in all directions. The horse gallops from one side of the screen to another, as if nowhere near the man. The man is cloaked in the dead of night, the horse is framed against the dawn sky. These two appear to be nowhere near each other, not even in the same time of day, and possibly not in the same reality, an accidental surrealism arising from the ragged visual continuity.
This must have been especially maddening to see in the VHS era, with different sequences playing like your VCR malfunctioned and started to loop over the same few minutes and skip the odd moment, like a showdown between Peter Boyle and the horse that has him repeatedly knocked back by the horse's kick (despite it clearly making no contact) and scream in pain endlessly with a chunk of skull dangling off his bloodied forehead. The horse raises its legs. Boyle falls back and shrieks. Flesh and bone dangle in close-up. Rinse. Repeat. It goes without saying that none of this is remotely scary, although the movie achieve a certain goofy rhythm. Setting it in the French countryside also gives it a pretty distinct texture, albeit one not conducive to building dread. (American forests seem like a natural environment for mad slashers, French forests make you want to go on a weekend getaway to a chateau.) There's also a touch of class with the use of some Bach on the soundtrack, likely because it''s in the public domain.
So is this any good? I don't know, but there are worse ways to kill seventy five minutes.