Thrastherpiece Theater: Devil Story (1986) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome

There are few things in the global low-budget horror filmmaking landscape as positively confounding as French director Bernard Launois’ (somehow) seventh and final feature film Devil Story, a gloriously bonkers nonsensical movie that more or less is the big screen celluloid version of also-French director Norbert Georges Moutier’s Mad Mutilator which hit video store shelves three years earlier.  Similarly opening in the form of a backwoods Nazisploitation slasher before immediately jumping the rails into crazy land in an equally near dialogue-free odyssey involving all kinds of brow wrinkling detours and excursions, like Mad Mutilator before it, is not the sort of thing you seek out for quality cinema.  Watching it unfold in motion, however, is a bit like experiencing hallucinogens as it segues from one increasingly bizarre, inane episode to the next.  It truly needs to be seen to be believed if you can remember any of it clearly.

 
Exploding from a tent donned in a Schutzstaffel uniform with a twisted spine, hog face and knife is a deranged (masked?) murderer who roams the Normandy backwoods slaying any and all who cross his path including but not limited to campers nearby.  Meanwhile a nameless couple’s car breaks down and they decide to spend their night in a makeshift hotel modified from an old castle.  Against warnings of an urban legend pertaining to a cursed pirate ship which crashed into the local cliffs, the uneasy wife wanders off into the woods only to find herself pursued by the knife wielding deformed Nazi who happens to also have a Gypsy mother.  Meanwhile a black horse is demonically possessed and running amok stomping on people while a hunter helplessly fires round after round at it while not hitting a thing.  Then a toothpaste puking mummy comes out of a grave in the ground which makes the Nazi salute to an undead Egyptian sorceress and I think some other shit happens after that.
 
While gory and vomitous with some really very weird death scenes let alone killings in a horror movie, Devil Story for all of its audiovisual ineptitude is kind of transfixing.  Just what in the name of all that’s Holy is going on here?!  Literally treading in the same French footprints as Mad Mutilator with equally reckless abandon, you watch in bewildered astoundment rather than feel any intended “fears” coming off of this thing.  Every bit as insane as Moutier’s Super 8mm lo-fi batshit horror epic with an equally tinny Casio keyboard score by Paul Piot and Michel Roy and woefully inept camerawork by Guy Maria and editing by Raymonde Battini, every misstep into unstable ground feels more stunningly wrongheaded than the last and you start to wonder if Dadaism was secretly the real impetus behind this mess. 

 
You also get some truly outlandish performances from its cast, notably Pascal Simon as whatever you wanna call the main monster in this thing faintly resembling a movie, with him skulking and limping about growling or oinking underneath what plainly looks like a latex rubber face mask plastered over the actor.  I guess the film’s scream queen is played by Veronique Renaud and boy do her scenes of kicking and screaming go on and on and on to such a ridiculous degree the film almost dares us to get angry at its lunacy.  And there’s some old drunkard trying to take his horse out with a shotgun and the film cuts to many extended scenes of the horse running and neighing around who inadvertently comes to the rescue as a frail old woman tries to bury the scream queen alive using a headstone that looks heavy in one shot but is clearly light as a feather in the next.

 
Stupid, mind numbing, sometimes infuriatingly inept, Devil Story though running a brief seventy-six minutes is for a majority of viewers time of their life they won’t get back.  On the one hand its incoherent illogical narrative, if you can call it such, landed it in a scant few French cinemas to understandably scathingly negative reviews and poor business with many attributing it as exemplar of why French cinema stayed away from horror for years.  Though France would eventually take their more conservative approach to horror to shocking new heights with the New French Extreme movement giving way to films like Trouble Every Day or Irreversible, the cult of Devil Story still had years to go before finally finding an audience.  Sometime in 2011 however the cult began when a real DVD release of the film came out and a decade later Vinegar Syndrome gave the most definitive release possible with their new 4K restored disc including archival making-of extras and selected scenes commentary with the director.

 
Why see this piece of shit?  Well, there’s a multitude of reasons.  Much like The Man Who Saves the World aka Turkish Star Wars, there’s a delightful almost communal charm in spectacular artistic failure.  The worse it gets, the more we can’t stop compulsively watching it.  An accidental slice of surreal horror as stunningly incompetent filmmaking, Devil Story in the right crowd under the right influences is kind of a blast.  Not something to try and analyze intellectually or critically, a bit closer to a weird video installation of random things happening as you down another beer or smoke another joint while intoxicatedly guzzling down another slice of pizza, Devil Story is kind of a cornerstone of batshit cinema that feels like Indonesian black magic horror retrofitted for the French countryside.  Roses are red, violets are blue, I’m a schizophrenic and so am I.

--Andrew Kotwicki