The Devil's Rain

The Devil’s Rain (1975)
Dir. Robert Fuest
Written by: James Ashton, Gabe Essoe, Gerald Hopman
Starring oh boy, you got William Shatner, Tom Skerritt, Ernest Borgnine, Keenan Wynn, with John Travolta and Anton LaVey in small roles. Can you beat that?!

What the fuck is even happening here? It hurts the eyes just to look at it!

    THE DEVIL’S RAIN opens with some of the best horror imagery ever devised by man, the phantasmagoric hell-scapes of Jheronimus van Aken, better known as Hieronymus Bosch. It’s a nice touch, because there’s nothing in the movie that specifically makes reference to Bosch or his work. They’re just setting an appropriately nightmarish tone, which after a strong start gradually declines but still manages to eke it out to the end of the movie. But man, what a start. After the camera menacingly probes the perverse details of Bosch’s Christian bad acid trip visions over the credits, we cut right to a tense William Shatner pacing around his home while rain pours down outside. He’s waiting for his father, who seems to be out on some unspecified dangerous mission. Finally, his truck pulls up outside --ah, thank god he made it! But the figure that knocks on the door isn’t him at all, it’s a ghoulish doppelganger with gouged-out eyes who suddenly melts into a festering pile of goo. Before you know it Shat’s mom has been kidnapped by Satanists, and he’s off to a cool Mexican ghost town to face the cult’s leader, Jonathan Corbis (Ernest Borgnine, all grinning menace). And all that’s in the first 20 minutes! We haven’t even seen Tom Skerritt yet!

    RAIN can be a little cheesy at times, but I think it’s got a very underappreciated screenplay which take some genuinely unusual and successful turns. It’s almost like PSYCHO in that it doesn’t turn out to be about the characters that first appear to be the protagonists, and gradually sort of ends up being more about the villains. It throw you off guard right away by dropping you head first into a obviously high-stakes situation which you don’t entirely understand, and then keeps you from getting too comfortable with a few sudden directional turns (including a fairly long flashback to Puritan times, how often do you get to see that?). It also successfully --and almost casually-- manages to blend Western iconography, period horror, satanism, family drama, and slimy gore effects into a particularly intoxicating concoction which is always strange but somehow never seems disjointed or chimerial.

This is the direction my career will go.

The screenplay does suffer from under developing its protagonists, (which make it hard to care too much what happens to them) but compensates with some pretty neat production design and horror setpieces. The satanists all have creepy burnt-out eyes* (except Borgnine, whose naturally crazy eyes are still a horror highlight) which definitely freaks my shit right out. Their weird waxy melting is an usual and nasty touch, and --more than anything-- Borgnine just seems so brazen and gleefully psycho that he’s legitimately intimidating. You really believe this guy might just be too powerful to stop. But the film’s real stroke of genius is the object of it’s title. Corbis stores souls of the people he’s defeated in a kind of glowing jar --the Devil’s Rain-- where we disturbingly get a glimpse of them scratching pitiably at the glass in front of vast expanse of pouring rain and black nothingness. It’s a pretty unique and bleak take on hell, and I appreciate that in a movie which often thrills on going way overboard (at one point Borgnine gets so full of devilish power that he transforms into a not-especially-convincing man-goat hybrid).

    There are things which are a little too amateurish about this one to call it a lost classic, but it’s definitely a uniquely strange one with some great ideas. Borgnine is classic as the cult leader, but I also like the odd anti-coupling of Tom Skerritt and William Shatner as brothers. Shatner is all old fashion bravado, which is perfect for a film which seeks to evoke medieval high drama from its credit sequence onward. But Skerritt is all 70’s counterculture swagger, at odds with the earnestness of the rest of the characters. It makes sense, though, because we discover that Skerritt was somehow not hip to his family’s involvement with these Satanic goings-on, so he’s a confused outsider trying to figure out exactly what’s going on in a world which seems completely alien not only to his intellect but to his basic temperament. It would work better if Skerritt was trying a little harder or the movie had more interesting things for him to do, but still it’s another lively and unique dynamic in a film which is chock full of them (by the way, try and spot Travolta, who has one line as a eyeball-less extra).

This movie honestly has more melting than THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN. And that is literally nothing but melting.

Director Robert Fuest had previously directed the well-regarded AND SOON THE DARKNESS, as well as both the DR. PHIBES films, which are considered to be minor horror classics. Unfortunately, this movie was so poorly-received that it effectively ruined his career. too bad, because he was obviously working hard on this one, even going so far as to hire Church of Satanism founder and Rolling Stones fan Anton LaVey as a “technical adviser” (I guess he also appears in the film, although I didn’t spot him). LaVey was by this time already solidly Hollywood --becoming a scene figure as cults like the Process Church and Scientology began to take off in the area and attract the interest of entertainment icons-- but you gotta appreciate Fuest’s boldness in selling the film with a figure who was genuinely shocking to conservative America. It brings a welcomed bit of sleazy disreputability to the film, although presumably not much gritty reality (unless melting, blind goatmen were a bigger part of LaVey’s religion than I am assumed). 

I wanted to put sexy robed Borgnine in here, but you owe it to yourself to click here for Borgnine Goatman!

By the end the film sort of runs out of steam, failing to build to a suitably impressive climax and stumbling on one too many silly moments. But it’s still sort of worth it for the amusingly egregious final sequence where Corbis’s followers all melt in the rain. For like 15 minutes. It’s the goopy horror equivalent of the famous ally fight fight from THEY LIVE. It just keeps going and going, and just as you think they’re puddles, they couldn’t possibly melt any further, well, they just keep melting. It goes against all sense and good taste, outrageous enough that you can’t help but laugh. And then, out of the blue, it ends with a genuinely disturbing twist. A fitting way to go out for a movie which is stubbornly --sometimes wrongheadedly, but always entertainingly-- it’s own unique mix of sleaze, strangeness and genuine gothic horror

* In fact, this movie is most famous for a single prop -- the William Shatner mask with burnt out eyes went into storage along with the other props, neglected until 1978 when a young unknown Indie filmmaker named John Carpenter came along...

Look Familiar?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2012 CHECKLIST!

LOVECRAFT ADAPTATION: No.
BOOBIES: I think I remember some in there, but I wouldn't swear to it. Shatner gets topless, anyway.

> or = HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS LEVEL GORE: Lots and lots of melting, and I believe there's a sacrifice in there.
SEQUEL: Not yet.
OBSCURITY LEVEL: High. Despite it's cast, it's been out of print.
MONSTERS: Goatman!
SATANISTS: Dozens!
ZOMBIES: No
VAMPIRES: No
SLASHERS: No
CURSES: Yeah, Shat and Skerritt's family is cursed by Corbis.
ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: Awake up to the part where Shatner gets to the church. Never saw Tom Skerritt.

Jubilee

Jubilee (1978)
Dir. Derek Jarman
Starring Jordan, Toyah Willcox, Adam Ant, Richard O’Brien, Nell Campbell

Here’s a funny little bit of 70s pop art, an early attempt at capturing the punk aesthetic on film before punk had even really crystallized into a genre of music. It probably doesn’t have as much to say about society and philosophy as it thinks it does, but on the other hand it’s probably saying a lot more about 70s England than it thinks it is, too. So, you know, give a little, get a little. And as far as pretentious self-consciously arty 70s anti-narratives go, it’s pretty entertaining. So given that Paul McCartney etc just wished the Queen a happy diamond jubilee, I figure it’s only fair to remind the world that Toyah Willcox, Adam Ant, Jordan, and the guy who played Riff Raff in ROCKY HORROR beat them to the punch by 30 year and a lot of nudity.

The framing device for this story finds queen Elizabeth I (Jenny Runacre, small parts in THE LADY VANISHES, THE PASSENGER, and THE WITCHES and also playing a dual role here) being brought forward in time to the late 70’s by her advisor, occultist John Dee (Richard “Riff Raff” O’Brien, who Adam Carolla once described as the most obnoxious guest he ever had on his show). The queen wanders around what appears to be a post-apocalyptic wasteland overrun by bored, violent, nihilistic punks and expresses some concern over the direction her country has taken. Her criticism has a certain amount of support, because, for example, the current queen has just been killed in a arbitrary street mugging. Not necessarily a sign of a stable, prosperous society in my book. Take it from a Political Science major.

Seriously, teachers. Leave those kids alone.

But maybe we’re better off, because it must be said that the queen is super boring, but the various punks, arsonists, anarchists, nihilists, musicians, and sexual deviants that overrun the film are mostly a colorful and amusing lot. Much has been made over the film’s inclusion of early punk staples like Adam Ant, The Slits, and Souxie and the Banshees, but mostly the film is populated by cult actors and early punk scene kids (for instance, Malcolm McLaren protege and Sex Pistols’ muse Jordan) so don’t expect a big parade of cameos. They’re playing exaggerated, absurdist versions of their already exaggerated, absurdist personas, so there’s a kind of mordantly funny parody of the apocalyptic concerns expressed by most of straight society at this new generation of deviants.  

On one hand, it’s kind of a pretentious art film, where people might say things like, “In those days, desires weren't allowed to become reality. So fantasy was substituted for them - films, books, pictures. They called it 'art'. But when your desires become reality, you don't need fantasy any longer, or art.” or maybe out of the blue we’ll watch a naked ballerina dance around a bonfire in the middle of a bombed-out wasteland in slow motion for the entire duration of a classical piece. Oh my, look, they’ve juxtaposed classic British high culture with profane modernity, however did they think to do that. But on the other hand, director Jarman isn’t entirely above indulging in the more pulpy aspects of his punky Mad Max London, so a reliable stream of orgies and murders keeps things nicely visceral.

The movie is clearly a reaction to 1970s British malaise, as the economy crumbled, the Empire waned, and British cultural identity suddenly came into question. Jarman cleverly shoots the whole thing on location, using the bombed-out WWII era husks which are still around to remind us that this is an England which is caught between a past that it can’t let go of and a future which it can’t seem to build towards. So even though I think Jarman is over-reliant on trying to shock you with his nihilist characters, their reactionary lifestyle does feels truthful on some level -- emotionally, anyway. It’s not such a far cry from listening to the Sex Pistols articulate their own frustrations with the decaying ruins of classist English society in the excellent Julian Temple doc THE FILTH AND THE FURY. You can see that these kids were not just lashing out pointlessly: they were making an (admittedly crude) calculated political statement about the pathetic future that their society was offering them. The deliberately modeled themselves as a chaotic inverse to repressed, regressive postwar British culture. ‘You expect us to just shut up and accept a pathetic half-life of stuffy mannerisms and fading empire? Well fuck you, we quit. We’re not playing your game. We’re making up our own rules.”

Condescending Jordan is condescending.

As with most movements which are purely reactionary, I’m not sure their philosophy holds up quite as well out of context. I mean, I’m for mayhem, pretty theft, nudity, androgyny, unprotected casual sex, pyromania, and punk rock as much as the next fellow (and actually, probably a lot more, now that I think about it). But these days, I’d say idealism is more revolutionary than nihilism. Perhaps because we needed the prickly rejectionism of the early punk movement to break us out of the 70’s doldrums before we could move into ironic postmodernism, and finally, some kind of new perspective which is possibly just peeking into the public consciousness today.

But even if not, it’s at least intermittently fun to watch these freakos do their thing. In particular, Toyah Willcox and Jack “The Incredible Orlando” Birkett are mesmerizing as a sociopath pyromaniac and insane record label executive, respectively. Birkett is apparently primarily a dancer and mime, and completely blind to boot (I guess that explains his Borgnine-level crazy eyes) but he’s playing an already outrageous character with both the crazy and the charisma turned up to 11. He’s a side character in this one, but ends up feeling like the central hub around which the movie rotates -- and although their criticism of media conglomeration and corporate opulence is somewhat passe now, you gotta remember that it’s pretty impressive (and still trenchant) in a movie from fuckin 1978. It also sounds the death knell to punk maybe 3 years after it came into existence. It would be amoral corporate interests like Birkett’s “Ginz” character (and of course, Jordan’s own boss Malcolm McLaren) that would ultimately reduce punk to a safe, predictable, mass-marketable hollow shell. Those equally reactionary right-wing types who used to spit on John Lydon everywhere he went? They didn’t win. But the money did. The money always does. 

The seductive face of evil.

Anyway, an interesting little time capsule which falls somewhere between HOLY MOUNTAIN and REPO MAN. In a few years, the punk aesthetic would becomes commercialized and conglomerated and be sold off globally in little chunks until it was meaningless. By the early 80s, it became shorthand for a hostile, dispensable “other” that folks like Charles Bronson could blow away in an effort to restore a decent society. But here, for an occasionally irritating but memorable 103 minutes, it’s nice to have a reminder of how it is we got there in the first place. If Queen Elizabeth I really did travel through time to the present, I’m sure she’d have some major issues with what she saw. But I think she might like the movie. Like its protagonists, it can be longwinded, vacant, and ugly. But there’s an essential germ of genuine truth and bruised humanity in there, and as a snapshot of a turbulent and dismal time for Old England, I think it’s just about right.

God Save the Queen.

We mean it, Maaan.

Emperor of the North

Emperor of the North a.k.a Emperor of the North Pole (1973)

Dir. Robert Aldrich

Starring Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Ernest Borgnine’s Crazy Eyes, Keith Carradine

How are you going to say no to a movie with that cast, from the director of THE DIRTY DOZEN? You might think you could hold out because you’ve never heard if it before, but when I tell you Ernest Borgnine has a huge hammer that he uses to crack open the skulls of hobos foolish enough to try and catch a ride on his train you’ll have to relent and admit that you’re on your way home to watch it right now. That’s the magic of the written word, right there. Pen is mightier than the sword, although not necessarily stronger than Borgnine flinging his goddam hammer at your fragile brain-pan.

This is an enjoyable and leisurely study in unassuming badassery from Robert Aldrich, and while it’s not quite as overwhelming as it might have been with that cast, it’s obviously worth the time for anyone who cares about decency. Lee Marvin plays a venerable hobo of some distinction among his peers named A #1, who is goaded into the ultimate show of hobo prowess: catching a ride on a train conducted by the notably anti-hobo Shack (Borgnine, positively unable to contain his enthusiasm for murder). Carradine plays a boastful greenhorn hobo named Cigaret, full of false bravado but without the experience to back it up. As Cigaret gets in over his head, A#1 reluctantly steps in as his mentor.

In this time before hobos had shotguns, they couldn’t do much to change the society of their Depression-era Northwest home, but they could at least stick it to the man. The film plays their antics as an effort to find some pride and humanity, and it adds a little understated emotional heft to a film which is basically about two guys trying to ride on a train without another guy seeing them. Clocking in at a minute shy of two hours, it’s a leisurely film with a surprisingly meandering plot, but it wisely keeps Marvin and Carradine at its center. Marvin is as cool as you’d imagine, quiet and confident. Carradine (in his second film and first starring role) grates a little as the brash younger man. It’s an irritating performance and character, but I think intentionally so. We occasionally catch a glimpse of the frightened kid behind the too-loud braggart, and it helps give the performance a touch of desperation and come off more sympathetic.

The odd thing about the film is that it seems weirdly unaware of its own darkness. The aggressively whimsical musical cues and sunny, gorgeous composition would lead us to believe this is a lark about hobo hijinks on the open road, but the content of the story is quite disturbing. Borgnine isn’t just an uptight authority figure to knock off his high horse -- he’s a homicidal psychopath just barely maintaining a thin veneer of assholery to cover it up. He doesn’t kill hobos because he wants to control his train; he drives a train so he has an excuse to sadistically kill a class of people no one is going to miss right out in the open. And Marvin and Carradine aren’t much better off. They’re filthy, tattered bums who have no hope whatsoever of ever rejoining society. The only option they have to retain any dignity at all is to become an Emperor of the North Pole – a top tier hobo. They lie, steal, nearly get killed and seriously endanger plenty of lives (their own and others) to try and achieve this lofty goal, but its pointlessness is already there in the title. Emperor of the North Pole still ain’t got shit. Meanwhile their friends are happily taking bets over whether or not they’ll be violently killed. Shit, this is a film which begins with a guy’s corpse getting cut in fucking half by a train. It ends in an absolutely brutal, bloody fight where A#1 and Shack go at each other with 2x4s, chains, rusty nails, hammers and axes, followed by a fairly heartbreaking coda where one major character is utterly destroyed and completely denied any redemption. But then after it ends the music cues up this stereotypical inspiring western melody, as if this is some lighthearted lark.

Clearly overseas they understand that sex sells.

I’m not sure if this was studio bungling, or if Robert Aldrich didn’t realize what he had, or what. But the plot and the creative side of the film seem to be constantly pulling in two different directions. I’m all for dark movies which don’t need to constantly drown you in depressing mise-en-scene, but this one seems to actively undermine its inner darkness as if it’s throwing its hands over its ears and shutting its eyes to it. If there’s a reason it hasn’t quite achieved classic status, this weird divide between style and content is probably it. It’s never as whimsical as it’s telling us it is, nor does it effectively take advantage of the black heart at the center of its narrative.

That said, you’re still going to watch it, and you’re going to find plenty of great things in there. For one thing, Lee Marvin fights two kids using a live chicken as a weapon. There are some classic and fun one-ups and tricks by the hobos as they scramble to stay ahead of Borgnine and the law, and some equally entertaining dirty tricks employed by Shack. There’s a scene where the two hobos scam a bunch of townies at a riverside baptism featuring a buxom brunette who becomes much more interesting to watch after being baptized (go ahead, look; Lee Marvin’s staring too). And it has Sid Haig and apparently fucking Lance Henriksen as hobo extras (I don’t think either of them has a line of dialogue, but you’ll at least notice Sid Haig’s menace in there. If anyone can find Henriksen in this thing you fucking tell me where he is. It’s like locating Joe Strummer in WALKER.) Even if the film’s weird disconnect between tone and narrative means it falls short of the classic it could have been, its still a fun, classy ride with two of cinemas greatest badasses squaring off on top of an actual moving train. Don’t even try and tell me you can do better with two hours of your time.