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.
--Andrew Kotwicki