The Devil’s Rain

    I have to admit that this one threw me for a bit of a curve. First off I’ve seen it before. I had a friend who was a film buff and he and I would have fairly frequent ‘bad movie nights’ and this made the list. It was difficult to separate it from our sub-MST3K heckling from back in the day and try to actually watch and take the movie in. Secondly it’s such a long, slow slog of a movie that I know for a fact that I nodded off several times while watching it and not only woke up in the same scene but during the same shot. They were all variations on long takes of desert landscapes that were pretty enough but didn’t do much more than keep underlining that yes, we were once again on our way to or from the only two locations in the movie. Thirdly the plot is both jumbled and ludicrously simple, any complications coming from the fact that there is about half an hour of story rattling around this 86 minute movie and so they have to stretch the material or insert breaks in the action to get it to feature length while at the same time oftentimes forgetting to give important plot points until a few minutes before they become relevant.

That's some nice Bosch you've got there.

    I even glanced at some other reviews, which is usually absolutely a bad idea in case you accidentally lift an idea or a turn of phrase, but I was genuinely at a loss. I was struggling to find an ‘in’ on this movie. Did I focus on the landscape shots and accuse the film of being an excuse to spend some time filming the countryside? Did I do a long dive into the career of Ernest Borgnine, easily the best part of this movie? Or an elegy to the career of Ida Lupino? Did I dig up the history of the town they shot the majority of this movie in? Eventually I was able to piece together that this was another example of a producer having some kind of vision and hiring the cast and crew to get it up on the screen. In this case it was the decent-for-1975 effect of Satanic worshipers slowly and methodically melting into goo in the titular Devil’s Rain. Through that lens it became clear that the movie was essentially made to back-fill an excuse get to those goopy scenes.

    None of that is particularly interesting so I thought I’d tug at a string that’s both obvious and kind of not: the Satan angle. This movie came out two years after ‘The Exorcist’ and while you’d think that’d be the cultural touchstone, it was for most 70’s horror for a while, it’s really kind of not. It reminds me more of movies like ‘The Devil Rides Out’ (1968) or ‘To the Devil a Daughter’ (1976), a kind of Americana take on Hammer horror, though putting it like that makes it sound way classier than it actually is.

    This was on the cusp of the Satanic Panic of the 80’s and people still knew who Anton LaVey was (he is listed as a consultant on ‘The Devil’s Rain’ in some capacity). It treats the existence of an entire town of Devil worshipers as completely unsurprising and at no point does anyone claim that the Devil doesn’t exist. What confrontations there are between Borgnine and any of the other characters are treated as matter-of-fact contests of faith with Borgnine always the victor. Why I say it doesn’t seem influenced by ‘The Exorcist’ but instead by Hammer horror movies is because it entirely lacks any of the nuance or psychology that the former introduced to the idea of the Satanic while flopping desperately in pursuit of the spectacle of the latter. There is a demon in this movie but it’s just Ernest Borgnine in a goat mask. There is no temptation, no seduction, it’s just simple us vs. them, good vs. evil, and evil by all accounts has the stronger team. In a strange way there’s not really even any morality involved in the movie. None of the ‘good’ characters are ever portrayed as particularly good people and Borgnine isn’t some lunatic, he just wants his book and some revenge, he’s not involving outside parties. With a couple rewrites you could turn this into a Western with two families feuding over mineral rights pretty easily.

If you look closely you can just see The Devil on the left.

    Here’s the very loose framework that is the plot of this movie: Ernest Borgnine is a 300+ year old Satanic priest who has been tracking down the descendants of two of his disciples who betrayed him and stole a book with the signatures of those who have sold their souls to Satan. Until he has the book he can’t actually deliver the souls, they’re instead stuck in some kind of limbo where it’s always raining and they wail in despair. This would seem to be The Devil’s Rain but it’s never really explained. He finally finds the family and we open in medias res as he starts picking off the family members one by one and forcibly converting them into his Satanic disciples who have no eyes and, again, melt in the rain. Finally the only family member left is Tom Skerritt and his coincidentally psychic wife who drive out to find out what happened to the rest of his family and finally confront Ernest Borgnine. Skerritt, playing ostensibly the main character of the movie, is introduced 28 minutes into the movie, first sees Borgnine while he’s taking part in a ceremony to forcibly convert his brother 56 minutes into the movie, and finally confronts him 70 minutes into the movie when he sees he’s kidnapped his wife. The movie, again, is 86 minutes long.

Listen, this cannot have been a surprise for you.

    If you think those gaps between plot points are a bit long you’re absolutely right. There’s a bit of business with the book and where it is and who has it, a very late introduction of a vessel maybe containing the Devil’s Rain, a five minute flashback to Pilgrim times, and that’s really it. All of the rest of the time is landscape shots, establishing shots, people getting into and out of cars, walking into and out of buildings, not nearly as much dialogue as you’d think, and a couple of fist fights. Oh, and a good, solid, unbroken nine minutes at the climax of the Satanic disciples melting into goop. In the end this is barely even a horror movie as we think of them today. There are no jump scares, no real gore, it’s more of a melodrama than a thriller. It’s a very odd hodge-podge of ideas. It also ends on a down note that is both obvious and a little surprising and not in a good way. It’s a very 70’s ending where the bad guys win and nobody learns any lessons. I can’t really recommend this movie unless you’re somehow both a devotee of 60’s and 70’s obscure horror and have somehow missed this one. As a ‘so bad it’s good’ movie it has its moments and Borgnine is great but you’ll be spending far too much time staring at static landscapes and goopy makeup effects.

Goopy.