Posited
somewhere between Lucio Fulci’s supernatural gross-out The City of the
Living Dead and H. Tjut Djalil’s supremely bizarre black magic film Mystics
in Bali is Taiwanese director Jen-Chieh Chang’s figurative and literal
vomitorium of a horror movie The Devil.
Recently unearthed by Massacre Video, this long forgotten former VHS
cult oddity has been given some breath of new life in the form of a new 4K scan
though the original camera negative has deteriorated to such a moldy degree the
film unspooling can be deathly hard on the eyes. An early example of Taiwanese black magic
horror rife with witchcraft and a few out-of-place kung-fu scenes, The Devil
is mostly remembered as that worm and snake puking shocker that goes down
in history as one of the most disgusting films ever made.
Beginning
as a seemingly straightforward story of a con man intent on cheating a hotel
business family out of their life savings, this East Asian gutcruncher quickly
descends into grotesque pandemonium with the arrival of a vengeful spirit
carrying a supernatural virus which transforms its infected victims’ internal
organs into snakes, worms and maggots.
If this doesn’t sound wretch inducing enough, Chang stages scene after
slimy creepy crawly regurgitation scene with the poor cast members unlucky
enough to have accepted this acting job literally stuffing their mouths full of
live worms, snakes, centipedes and lord knows what else before throwing them up
for the camera amid bubbly green bile.
Just to add insult to injury, there are scenes of gangrenous sores
forming on an infected character’s body with fresh creepy crawlies seeping out
of the open wounds. It’s…that kind of
movie…
Narratively,
The Devil is far from perfect and tends to drag its feet for a good
chunk of the eighty-six minute running time.
The story itself is muddled and not particularly compelling and the
young bellhop working the hotel named Ding Dong (yes, you read that correctly)
manages to annoy quicker than Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of
Doom. Visually the film is well lit
and photographed though any kind of craftsmanship this thing may have had is
obscured by the piss poor image quality on the last surviving print. Performances are serviceable at best though
the film quickly takes on the shape of a Fear Factor episode as infected
characters are forced to convulse and spit mouthfuls of live snakes and worms
on the ground.
Far
more weird, gross and incoherent than artistically or narratively successful, The
Devil isn’t representative of quality filmmaking so much as it serves up a
black magic geek show with elements of the Shaw Brothers peppered in amid the
countless scenes of puking green bile and worms. East Asian horror comes in all shapes and
sizes but The Devil inhabits a curious ‘has to be seen to be believed’
subcategory loaded with sickening transgressions and a lot of creepy crawlie
covered vomit. The film is an occasionally
tedious mess and ends on kind of a dismal anticlimactic note. However, as it stands it is a one of a kind
black magic horror freakout determined to make even the most utterly jaded gorehounds
reach for their lunch bags in the event of an impromptu need to recycle said
meal. You've been warned.
--Andrew Kotwicki
