In addition to watching a great deal of movies, I read about them quite a bit, too. I often find this a way to discover, or finally pay attention to, movies I would not have otherwise watched. And so it was reading Satan in the Celluloid: 100 Satanic and Occult Horror Movies of the 1970s by P.J. Thorndyke that I ended up viewing 1975’s The Devil’s Rain.
Now, having seen it, I wonder how a movie could throw this much crazy up on the screen and yet be so boring. Here we have a film about the culmination of a multi-century conflict between one family and a Satanic sect. It has a cast you would not expect to be assembled in one place, including Ernest Borgnine, William Shatner, Kenan Wynn, Eddie Albert, Ida Lupino and Tom Skerrit. Hell, it even has Anton LaVey, the head of The Church of Satan, as a technical advisor!
Alas, it is Robert Fuest film, and I need to start heeding his participation in a work as a deterrent instead of an incentive. I may love both of the Dr. Phibes films he helmed, but The Final Programme was deeply awful. This time around, we get a film that isn’t so much flat-out terrible as it is just terribly, inexplicably dull.
It starts out promising enough, if batshit crazy is your thing (and it is mine, thank you very much). In a very short amount of time, we’re expected to understand through quickly delivered short lines of dialogue: Ida Lupino is the mother of William Shatner and their family has been tasked with keeping an ancient book hidden from somebody named Corbis, then an eyeless figure that appears to be Shatner’s father (but isn’t) arrives to tell them to surrender the book, only they end up melting in the rain. I guess melting in water proves fake-dad is evil, or maybe even the Wicked Witch of the West. Oh, and this isn’t the devil’s rain. It’s just rain. But it may still be evil, since we first see Shatner coming into the house from the shower, yet he is bone dry. That, or Shatner is evil. That would explain a lot, even some of his career outside of this film.
Shatner goes out to his truck, only to find a voodoo doll pinned to the steering wheel. Only in retrospect do I realize I don’t know: 1) who that doll is supposed to represent, 2) what being pinned to the steering wheel would do whomever that is supposed to be, and 3) Satanists use voodoo dolls?! With LaVey as a consultant, you’d think there would be more accurate depiction of his religion. Or, at least, you’d think he’d want to portray them as not evil. I always thought they were supposed to be more into hedonism than ritual sacrifice, but I guess that’s not the way he wanted to present his belief system to the world.
It turns out Ernest Borgnine is Corbis, the head of this particular sect. His is probably the best performance in the film. He also appears to be having a great time, and I suspect he is the only person in the cast who realizes what kind of movie he’s in. At a couple of points in the runtime, he plays the prince of darkness himself, courtesy of some pretty good facial prosthetics, a goofy white wig and curled horns atop his noggin.
Somebody who does not seem to know what they’re doing here is Tom Skerritt, who is Shatner’s brother. Actually, I only assume that is his relation to the man. All I know is we saw a picture earlier of the two, along with Lupino and melty dad earlier. What is weird is how much of the movie is focused on Skerritt, which I guess was necessary as it pulls Shatner off the screen early on and only brings him back later for a couple of brief scenes.
I’m not sure if Shatner knows what kind of movie he’s in or not. I figure he would deliver the same performance regardless of the genre or level of production. I’m not even sure if he’s a good or bad actor. You just get the same act in any film he’s in and it jives better with some pictures than others. All I know is, in one bit, Shatner bellows “CORRRBISSSS!!!” in a way that seems to foretell the way he will yell Kahn’s name in Star Trek II.
From what I can understand from the plot (which isn’t much), Borgnine and his followers were executed as devil worshippers a couple of centuries ago. Since then, they keep getting recreated though wax and whatever fluid is their “holy water” (they don’t explain beyond that, and I don’t want to know). Never mind who keeps recreating the entire community’s wax bodies. Since they don’t stand up to simple rain very well, I imagine maintenance is a full-time job.
Borgnine controls his flock by possessing their souls, which he keeps in some sort of container that seems to be made of porcelain with a small TV embedded in it. Admittedly, the image of tormented souls as we see on that tiny screen is a neat effect. Why something so necessary to his operation is kept in a container that is so fragile seems like inability to adequately perform long-term planning.
Far worse effects are used for almost every aspect of his minions. Their faceless eyes are accomplished through masks of the actor’s faces worn over their own, curiously making people like Shatner almost unrecognizable. Whatever they used to black out the eyes isn’t matte, and it keeps catching the lights. This completely spoils the effect, even though the intention is still pretty gross, somehow compounding the offensiveness. Also, these people spurt fluids of a couple of different colors when shot, seemingly every color except red. We will see this in a couple of scenes, as people keep bringing guns to a faith fight.
Despite all this seeming insanity, the bulk of The Devil’s Rain is shockingly dull. One problem is, once you’ve seen one of the minions melt away, repeating the effect brings rapidly diminishing returns. So just imagine how worn-down a person gets when we’re subjected to almost five minutes of that effect near the end. Then it has what is supposed to be a shocking twist as the end credits roll, except I couldn’t understand how what we see could possibly have had happened. Even worse, I didn’t care.
Dir: Robert Fuest
Starring: Ernest Borgnine, William Shatner, Tom Skerritt, Ida Lupino
Watched on Shudder