Il était une fois le diable

I seriously can't tell if this 80s French z movie is ridiculously inept or intentionally a surreal cheese-fest. Either way, it's lack of plot, inane pacing, bad acting, gore, and horrific dubbing are stupidly entertaining. It's like Ed Wood meets Fulci...

This is a rather incoherent film, with abject sound design. It seems the sound effect budget stretched to one owl hoot and one horse whinny, but with unlimited usage, so they tried to get their money worth.

Just cutting back on those sounds could have made the film 1 star more watchable.

So - is it a slasher, or is it a french gothic horror? The Venn diagram of that question is miraculously both and neither. I'm not even sure it's so bad it's good. It's just like two disparate and unrelated movies were told they had to sit together in class and cooperate.

A deformed creature (son of a "gypsy" cliche) stalks people in the woods, killing them. But then we learn of a lost ship carrying Egyptian treasures, and a mummy turns up for good measure. Then there's the repeatedly whinnying horse of satan that may be a harbinger, or may just be a cliche.

All of whom are faced by the woman who leaves the safety of a chateau dressed only in her nightwear for no explicable reason.

And all the subsequent exploits this may or may not entail.

Contrary to what my fellow IMDb reviewer Weirdling_Wolf writes, I believe that the French have given us plenty of decent horror films*, from B&W classic Les Diaboliques, to the dreamlike work of Jean Rollin, to zombie/action flick La Horde, to more contemporary shockers Inside and Martyrs. Devil Story isn't one of them though, being a strong contender for the strangest, if not worst, horror film ever made. This low budget crap-fest from director Bernard Launois is technically inept in almost every department and has a virtually non-existent plot, making it a must for fans of z-grade schlock.

The film opens with a grunting, snuffling facially disfigured man in an SS uniform killing several people with a knife and dumping their bodies down a well, before continuing his murderous spree with a shotgun. The action then cuts to a young married couple who experience car trouble during a storm and seek shelter at a stately home occupied by an old man and his wife. The lady of the house tells the visitors a story about a group of bandits who lured ships onto the rocks, and explains that their descendants still live in the area: the ugly monster from the opening scene and his mother.

During the night, the young woman decides to up and leave without her husband, but wishes she had stayed put when she runs into the hideous killer and his mum, who try to seal her in a tomb. She escapes, but runs into an Egyptian mummy and a zombie woman, who are also roaming the countryside. Meanwhile, the old man from the stately home is trying to shoot a very noisy horse with his shotgun.

Devil Story suffers from poor direction, choppy editing, amateurish make-up effects and lousy acting, but the worst thing about it is the soundtrack, with all sound effects at maximum volume and repeated incessantly: in addition to the constantly whinnying horse we also get a very vocal owl, and repetitive use of that old horror cliché Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 in a misguided attempt to add atmosphere. I reckon if anything is going to make you want to hit the stop button, it'll be that damn horse!

On the plus side, the gore effects, while not exactly special, are plentiful and fun, with quite a lot of spurting blood from wounds, the monster getting injured so that part of his scalp flaps around, and one really unconvincing but very messy moment when the mummy stomps on the man with the shotgun causing his guts to spill out.

2/10. It's film making at its most incompetent, but for a select few, Devil Story will prove every bit as entertaining as a Marvel blockbuster is for the masses.

*their music still sucks, though!

A four out of ten (4/10) is a good score for a bad movie that while isn't actually bad enough to warn folks away from, it isn't good enough to risk your reputation by advocating it as better than average. That would actually be about the worst score you could give a movie like this -- average -- because it's one of those movies that will either tickle your geek nerve or rub you the wrong way. It is ineptly made, incoherently edited, aimlessly plotted, unconvincingly staged, lacking in subtext or any sense of meaningful artifice of film as a craft, and the special effects "suck". My favorite is when they show people up close bleeding to death and you can see the action of a hand pump shooting the fake blood everywhere.

And yet the movie nonetheless still has something going on in it that I didn't think the French were capable of, namely a sense of humor about how to make art -- this is one of the funniest horror movies I've yet encountered. The best scenes in the film involve airborne attacks by a flying demonic kitty. Then there is the guy in the zombie mask dressed in Boy George's old uniform, shuffling around the French countryside randomly killing people in brutal manners just for the hell of it, apparently. He uses a knife, a shotgun, and one of those spiked gloves they wore in MAD MAX that will split someone's head open like a grapefruit if you punch them hard enough. There is also a mummy, a possessed zombie babe who looks like Soiuxie of The Banshees fame, and a pretty blonde woman (Véronique Renaud in what was sadly her only screen appearance) running around in her underwear, a raincoat and Wellington boots; We need more of this in films today.

There is also a retired war hero of some sort wandering around with what appears to be the same shotgun the zombie guy has, an old hag of a witch who it turns out controls the zombie & is engaged in some kind of task to trap people in the ground, and finally the horse. The horse is perhaps the biggest mystery in the film, it's role within the context of the story is obviously allegorical rather than literal, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what the point of it was other than to allow the director to repeatedly use a sound clip of the horse whinnying. After about the three hundred and fifth whinny you too will wonder what is going on here if you have not already become annoyed & gotten on with your life. But stick with it, this one's worth the effort.

The film is an enigma: It makes no sense, and in that way is very French in nature. I like how it explores the most mundane, unremarkable locations in the French countryside, appearing to have been filmed for the most part on public land when nobody else was around. It was also made for about $25,000 if even by the looks of it, and is in fact SO low budget that a stage hand actually had to toss the demonic attack kitty through the air to simulate it's frenzied assaults. But they managed to find a nice French castle to film for some atmospheric exteriors (complete with ominously hilarious Bach organ music), the movie has a kind of nihilistic aura to it where everyone dies & evil prevails, and there's some genuinely "EWWW!" inducing gore as the zombie guy slowly gets shot to pieces, bleeds grape jelly from the mouth, and keeps right on a-shufflin.

In other words, if the movie had some random gratuitous nudity & the mummy shot laser beams out of it's eye sockets, this film would pretty much have it all. It's easily the most enjoyable horror romp to come out of France since ZOMBIE LAKE, which gets the poo-poo from purists just because Jean Rollin was too snooty to accept the fact that he actually made a movie that was FUN. This one is too, though it doesn't make any sense & probably wasn't meant to. You can do that sometimes in the movies and it isn't necessarily a bad thing.

4/10

Devil Story (1985)

*** (out of 4)

If you're looking for a "story" then you're not really going to find it here. The film starts off with a deformed man/creature killing anyone he comes across while grunting like a nut. The story then goes to a dark castle where a mummy is running around and there's an old legend dealing with wreck ships. All of this is happening as a crazy man keeps shooting at a black horse and a blonde woman tries to escape something. Oh yeah, there's a black cat running around as well.

DEVIL STORY is without a doubt one of the strangest movies that you're ever going to see. I had never heard of the movie before getting a preview of it on a Facebook group and from here I read a couple reviews that made the film seem like one of the craziest ever made. I read these wild reviews and thought to myself that there's no way the film could live up to the hype but it actually met that hype and surpassed it. DEVIL STORY is a film that will be impossible to forget once you see it.

Jeez, where do you start? The film begins with some rather campy murder scenes but director Bernard Launois at least knows that horror fans want gore so each stabbing has all sorts of red stuff shooting out in just about every direction possible. After a few murders the film then goes to a Gothic style, which really reminded me one TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD. The mummy itself looked quite good and we're given several good scenes with it including one great one where it gets its faced ripped only to have white goo start to go everywhere.

The film is really, really surreal and often times it doesn't make a bit of sense. Scenes happen that don't add up and then you wonder what the hell it is you're watching. I'm not going to ruin the ending but it just kinda knocks you upside the head and you don't know what to think. There's not any nudity but that doesn't take away from the exploitation factor. The gore level and flat-out weirdness is just unlike anything I've seen before and I like to think that I've seen all sorts of weird films. DEVIL STORY is certainly one of a kind.