The Devil’s Rain(Robert Fuest, 1975)

As I found myself preparing to watch ‘The Devil’s Rain’ last week, I thought it might be fun to do something a bit different with this review - kind of a ‘Live Blog’, recording my observations as they occur to me whilst viewing. So, headphones on and VLC Player and Word document open side by side, that’s exactly what I did. Grammar, phrasing and fact checking have subsequently been revised, but aside from that, what follows is an exact record of the transactions that took place on that fateful night, between this 1975 motion picture and my brain.

00:35 Hieronymus Bosch credits sequence. Inspired or lazy? Your call. Either way, something tells me ‘The Devil’s Rain’ is unlikely to be able to live up to magnified details from ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ presented here.

01:00 One of those movies where you feel like the casting director (Lea Stalmaster, take a bow) should be driving around in a golden Cadillac. Ernest Borgnine, Ida Lupino, William Shatner and a pre-fame John Travolta – together at least.

01:20 Anton LaVey as ‘Technical Advisor’? Gimme a break. Total mersh Satanist movie.

01:40 Until his credit popped up, I had no idea this was directed by Robert Fuest (‘The Abominable Dr. Phibes’, ‘The Final Programme’). Expectation.. rising.

05:40 “Winds…. knocked the lines down!” – ah, William Shatner. How have I managed all these years, watching films that he’s not in?


07:20 So… Shatner’s father has returned home, cryptically noted that ‘Corbis’ is waiting in the desert, waiting for the book, then promptly melted into a pile of multi-coloured poster-paint goo, right there on the doorstep. Ida Lupino has intoned the words “In nomine Satanis” for presumably the first and last time in her storied career, and Shatner’s reaction shot says it all. So far this is… awesome? Well it depends on your point of view I guess, but I’m pretty happy with the way things are shaping up.

9:00 Grimoire hidden under the carpet. They’ll never find it there! I like how this book is being imbued with such vast metaphysical import. Kinda reminds me of those Lovecraft stories wherein even being in the room as the Necronomicon is enough to drive you to a state of nervous paralysis.

10:00 Shatner’s got a magnum and a cowboy hat. He’s going to fight the devil… on his terms. I can scarcely wait.


11:45 Goddamn. I was going to crack wise about the family’s strange, kindly-old-man servant (I think he’s a servant of some kind? Although he could just as easily be an uncle or something? I don't think it's ever made clear..), but this scene in which Shatner finds him tied to the ceiling by his feet, shrieking like a trapped beast, is actually incredibly upsetting. A very peculiar and unnerving performance from TV actor Woody Chambliss (who also played the kindly old man in Jim McBride’s unusual post-apocalypse movie ‘Glen & Randa’).


14:00 Man, the composer is reeeaaallly pushing that creepy dissonant, scraping glissandro string stuff. It can still be a great effect on soundtracks when done well, but the way he’s hammering it here is just beyond ridiculous, blasting it beyond cliché and out the other side.

16:00 Great, dreamy landscape shots illustrate Shatner’s journey to ‘the desert’. Loving the abandoned chapel set against the sky. For a mainstream(ish) studio picture, ‘The Devil’s Rain’ has a very disconnected, otherworldly atmosphere going on – reminds me slightly of dope-addled hippie era horror movies like ‘Werewolves on Wheels’ and ‘The Velvet Vampire’.


16:30 I love the way that the abandoned settlement where the Satanists dwell is obviously just a backlot Western town; “Be careful stranger, no one’s set foot in that there ghost town since they finished doing second unit work on ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’ last month…”

16:59 Tumbleweed!

18:00 Borgnine!


18:20 Borgnine’s water is bitter…but it’s a sweet way to end a thirst. Do I detect a certain fairy tale quality to this story?

20:33 A challenge! Shatner’s faith against Borgnine’s! I don’t know what to think.


21:40 Chanting… altar… pentagram. Job’s a good ‘un.

23:20 “Come forth from the abyss… open wide the gates of hell” – hmm, pretty corny stuff this. Old Anton earning his cheque, no doubt. Awesome stain glass window though, and I appreciate the shots of the dude playing the organ.

27:00 Satanists bleed multi-coloured goo. Protective talisman turns into a snake. Eyeless Lupino (un)stares on, and Shatner’s on the run. This whole sequence is really well shot.


29:00 Whoa, sudden scene change! Ok, so… is everything we’ve seen so far actually taking place in the subconscious of a woman (Mrs Preston? Shatner’s moustachioed brother’s wife?), who is taking part in some kind of ESP experiment in front of a lecture theatre full of students…?

31:30 Well, no, actually. Turns out that was just some kind of inexplicable diversion. Now we’re back down to… well I hesitate to say ‘earth’, but wherever it is the preceding scenes have been taking place…where Moustachioed Bro and his wife have returned home in search of his vanished family. The sheriff says half the county’s been washed away by the floods and he can’t possibly spare any men, but uh, if you guys want to grab some guns and go hunting for yr missing relatives in that old Western backlot town, be my guest – gimme a call in the morning or whatever and let me know how it goes. Now that’s the kind of light touch approach to law enforcement I can get with.

34:00 William Shatner fears not the torments of hell. In case you had any doubts.



37:00 Beautifully symmetrical long-shot of the car pulling up outside the frontier chapel… hokey as all this is, Fuest seems to be doing his best to build a real strong sense of oneiric disorientation…

43:00 Ladies and gentlemen, introducing John Travolta in his debut screen appearance, being kicked down the stairs by a dude with a moustache.

44:45 Red-tinted flashback to the Satanists’ origins as a heretical puritan sect back in colonial days. I’ll admit that my grasp of American history might be a bit shaky in places, but I wasn’t aware that many 17th century puritan sects made it out quite as far as Southern California..?


46:50 Love Ancestor-Borgnine’s faux innocence: oh, tis a mob of flaming torch weilding villagers at the door. What brings you fellows out here so late in the evening?

47:20 “Thou art the one… SLUT!” – another dialogue first for a great actor.

49:00 Ernie pulls some real oomph into his obligatory burned-at-the-stake “I curse you all” speech.

52:00 Ok, so thus far I wouldn’t go as far as to say this movie is ‘good’ exactly, but I certainly respect the filmmakers’ decision to turn in a film for a Hollywood studio that not only goes for a full-on delirious/dreamy fantastique atmosphere, making *no attempt whatsoever* to frame its action in the real world, but also seems to have been scripted by a somnambulant wino who once read a Dennis Wheatley book…

52:30 Holy shit! Maybe it’s just because I’m watching this with headphones on in the dark, but that wholly predictable backseat-of-the-car jump scare really put the wind up me. For all that I dissed the soundtrack above, the sound mix here was fucking murderous.

55:00 I wish I could have been there when they were filming this mass Satanist rally in the desert. Looks like a beautiful evening. All the open flame blowing in the breeze, sackcloth against yr skin… ah, that’s living.



56:15 So, uh… there was just a sudden insert shot of a dynamite explosion and now Ernest Borgnine has turned into a furry-faced, horned goat-man.

58:00 You too may wish to by sprinkled with ‘the waters of forgetfulness’ after watching Goat-Borgnine torture a shirtless William Shatner.

60:00 Goat-Borgnine looks too mischievous and lovable to really be a decent villain. I want him to caper off and lead us to a whimsical fantasy adventure of some kind, not stand here droning on about the doom that awaits our immortal souls.


70:30 This ‘devil’s rain’ vessel full of howling souls thing is a neat special effect. Very much reminds me of the kind of tricks Fuest was pulling off in ‘..Dr. Phibes’.

77:00 Vengeance of Goat-Borgnine forestalled due to melting.

79:30 More inexplicable dynamite blasts, to accompany the melting. You’d think God was some sort of unhinged mining prospector, the amount of bang-sticks he seems to be throwing around the place.

82:00 You know, everything I’ve read about this film over the years has mentioned the ridiculous amount of time dedicated to the melting of the cultists, but now that I come to watch it myself, I’m kinda disappointed. I was expecting a sequence of unparalleled repetitious madness, but actually the time allotted to the melting seems fairly reasonable. I mean, they clearly had a lot of cool melting effects to show off, and nothing much else to offer by way of a finale (give or take a few sticks of dynamite), so four or five minutes of melting doesn’t strike me as particularly excessive. In fact I could easily have gone for some more melting. I wanted a whole endless, senseless psychedelic melting extravaganza, goddamnit!


84:00 Chapel explodes – again, for no reason.

85:00 Well, there we have it folks. ‘The Devil’s Rain’. It is what it is, I suppose. Despite being probably one of the silliest films ever bankrolled by a Hollywood studio, it’s certainly worth a watch for us weirdo horror fans. It has some great ideas and distinctive visuals, and if they’d focused more on the darker aspects of the story and not made the portrayal of black magic so cartoon-ish and OTT, it could have been a pretty effective weirdo horror film. As it is though, the writing is intolerably flimsy (even from a Euro-horror fan’s POV), the acting is jaw-droppingly bad (ditto), the pacing is all over the joint, and the whole thing never quite comes together the way it should. Ah well – I still kinda enjoyed it, and I’m glad they had the guts to make it the way they did, rather than just doing some lifeless Exorcist/Omen knock-off and pleasing the suits. It brought us the sight of Ernest Borgnine turning into a giant goat and melting into a pile of poster paint goo, and for that I am thankful.


And thus ends our survey of '70s Backwoods Satanist Movies That Inexplicably Feature Great, Sam Peckipah-affiliated Actors. If anyone can think of any more that I might have overlooked though, please let me know, and I'll track them down post-haste!

VHS Purgatory: The Brotherhood of Satan (Bernard McEveety, 1971)

When I reviewed lovably eccentric Louisiana witchcraft movie The Witchmaker a few years back (mental note: gotta get a watchable copy of that some time), I failed to make the connection between producer L.Q. Jones and the gaunt cowboy actor of the same name who turns up in most of Sam Peckinpah’s ‘60s/’70s films. Partly I just wasn’t paying that much attention, and partly it just seems kinda unlikely, y’know? Well, turns out that it actually was that same L.Q. Jones, and that following the success(?) of his first venture into low budget occult horror, he and co-producer/actor Alvy Moore actually took a second shot at the genre, with Jones persuading his frequent on-screen partner Strother Martin to co-star in 1971’s Texas-lensed ‘The Brotherhood of Satan’. (You’ll remember the pair as the hapless bounty hunters in ‘The Wild Bunch’, and the varmints who leave Jason Robards to die in the desert in ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’.)

Regrettably, what they came up with is a dull and rather mystifying stab at the early 70s “Satanic panic” sub-genre, mostly lacking the self-contained charm of its predecessor. But, it is at least a lot stranger than the already fairly strange 'Witchmaker’, and that’s gotta count for something.

What manner of madness is this, you may find yourself asking from the outset, as the film opens with motion-blurred close-ups of tank tracks crushing piles of metal, accompanied by grinding machine noise and occasional sounds of people screaming in terror, intercut with shots of a wind up toy tank (shades of ‘Astro Zombies’). When this… whatever it is.. has been completed, we see a small boy walking away from a pile of smouldering wreckage. Climbing a hill, he meets a couple of other children, including a girl who begins to brightly glow in supernatural fashion – cue animated credits sequence.

After that, we’re introduced to a happy family who are having a nice day out near a.. lake? I guess it’s a lake. Driving off, they travel along a desert road, where they discover the crushed car seen in the prologue. Heading to a nearby town to report this rather extreme ‘accident’, they meet with an inexplicably hostile reception, as the cops immediately rough up and interrogate the father, before a crowd of locals descend upon their car in a kind of mass rage. “You took them away from us!”, a man who looks rather like Fidel Castro yells despairingly as the family turn tail and get the hell out of there.

Strange stuff this. Definitely uneasy. Not at all a good end to a day at the lake. But yes – unease, unease, unease seems to be prolific TV director Bernard McEveety’s bag, his apparent disdain for establishing shots and clear transitions leaving us with an uncomfortable mixture of blurry, abstract close ups and cramped, medium shot dialogue scenes that never really settles down into any kind of sensible rhythm.

The actual storyline of the film, once we’ve figured it out, is predictable bordering on tedious – a coven of elderly citizens are using Satanic powers to prevent local people from leaving town, and hypnotising/stealing their children one by one, so that they can transfer their spirits from the older bodies to the younger and continue their unholy existence. Ho hum. A pretty straight-down-the-line set up for horror fans, and unfortunately one that veers closer to the oh-so-‘70s threat-to-the-family vibe of ‘The Stepford Wives’ or Bert I. Gordon’s achingly dull ‘Necromancy’ than to the more decadent, whacked out brand of Satanism I tend to favour.

But linear though this plot may be, it becomes unbearably confusing simply due to the film’s refusal (or inability?) to really communicate anything to us very effectively. Hard to explain quite what I mean, but basically this is the kind of film where at any point characters we’ve never seen before can start wondering around, talking about stuff we have no interest in; in which we’re never quite sure where or why a certain scene is happening, or what pertinent information we should take away from it. Whether the result of incompetent editing, heavy cutting or reliance on incomplete footage, or just an admirable (if doomed) attempt to avoid exposition-heavy dialogue, the result is that we’re often simply lost.

I know at this point you’re probably thinking “great, I love movies like that”, but the kicker here is that not a great deal happens to make any of this narrative heavy lifting worthwhile. Despite some moderate outbursts of violence and fright, the whole thing has an inescapable TV movie feel about it, which certainly gels with McEveety’s CV. But imagine a TV movie directed by someone who seems to be looking to Jess Franco as a paragon of narrative efficiency, and you’ll start to get the idea.

Not that the Franco comparison extends much further than that, unfortunately. Certainly Uncle Jess wouldn’t think much of ‘Brotherhood..’s subdued retiree Satanists, led by head cultist Strother Martin, here mustering little of the energy he brought to his western roles as he intones some totally square Satanic litanies (just yr typical “oh Lord Satan..” sorta stuff really). Admittedly, their hideout does have a couple of pretty cool sets (that cobweb-shrouded giant ankh gateway thing is a bit of an eye-opener), and all that business with making hypnotised children stand motionless on marble pillars is pretty peculiar and subliminally disturbing, but… yeah, not much doing really.

In essence I think ‘Brotherhood of Satan’ is a viewing experience very well suited to the pungent charms of this 1989 Parkfield Entertainment VHS (other titles in the “Hollywood Horror Collection” include ‘Torture Garden’, ‘The Mutations’ and ‘Blind Terror’). As well as the coating of nutritious fuzz, adding an extra layer of unearthliness to otherwise mundane imagery, it’s a good one for drifting in and out of sleep to as the VCR wheels whir.

In fact, good advice for watching this one would be… well actually good advice would be to watch something that provides some degree of entertainment value or emotional/intellectual engagement instead. But if say you were to find yourself stuck on some hellish airline where they’re showing this as the inflight movie, taking some sedatives and just letting it roll over you is definitely the way to go.

Yes, watching whilst fully awake would be a mistake. You’d only start asking questions. Why do the elderly Satanists seem to be letting a a young-ish woman join their ranks? Why - possibly as a result of this, possibly not - does one of the elderly women in the coven have to beg for her life before the altar and then stand motionless on a pillar with the kidnapped children whilst the rest of the cult mock her? What’s the reasoning behind giving Strother Martin’s character a ‘real world’ identity as the town’s mild-mannered doctor? (His secret identity as head Satanist is never revealed to the good guys, and he never uses any of the information he’s learned from hanging around with them to modify the plans of his cult - in fact he does bugger all in either of his identities really). Why, after a typically confusing scene in which it is implied that two people have died, do we see our male lead (who wasn’t there) walking shell-shocked through some hellish basement full of body bags as the police question him?

No, best not to worry about any of that. Just wash half a sleeping pill down with a few stiff drinks. As you drift in and out of consciousness, strange pictures will appear, flickering across your mind’s eye, hinting at far stranger mysteries than this the sober surface of ‘The Brotherhood of Satan’ is able to provide.

Men in monastic robes move hypnotised, formally attired children around on a chequered floor, like chess pieces.

A woman sinks into an armchair, experiencing some sort of seizure, as her husband(?) sits disinterestedly behind her, reading obscure and/or oddly translated bible verses aloud.

A distraught deputy sheriff chases the dust cloud kicked up by a departing car, waving an orange toy monkey above his head.

These are the building blocks ‘The Brotherhood of Satan’ offers the brave somnambulist. Dare you try to assemble them..?

Race With The Devil(Jack Starrett, 1975)

Having inadvertently formalised the concept of “70s Backwoods Satanist Movies Inexplicably Featuring Great, Sam Peckinpah-Affiliated Actors” (or 70sBSMIFGSPAA, if you will) in my Borgnine obit post last week, I thought the least I could do was undertake perhaps the first ever deliberate overview of this much overlooked sub-genre, beginning with what is probably its commercial and creative high water mark, 1975’s ‘Race With The Devil’.

Before we begin, I’d suggest having a good look at the UK quad poster art reproduced above. Imagine walking past a cinema and seeing THAT outside!* I’m sure we can all agree that there would be no possible option but to go in and buy a ticket immediately. Clear the diary, family commitments be damned – I am going to see this movie in which Peter Fonda and Warren Oates fight hooded Satanists with shotguns and drive a tooled up camper van off an exploding bridge, and I am going to see it now.

Such is the kind of reaction ‘70s exploitation distributors seem to have been banking on through much of the decade, and so my feeling of having been born several decades too late increases. I mean, fuck Batman, y'know? I know where my hypothetical dollar is going. Not that ‘Race With the Devil’ is exactly an exploitation film in the strictest sense guess, being bankrolled and distributed by 20th Century Fox… but, well, I’ve always been a little confused as to what precisely it is, to be honest. On the one hand, it’s got a totally stupid horror plotline and a mind-blasting, action-packed poster that would put Roger Corman or Crown International to shame, but at the same time, it’s got big studio money behind it and… Peter Fonda? Warren Oates? I mean, those guys maybe weren't A-grade marquee names in ‘75, but they were still proper actors, y’know? Men who picked their projects carefully and tried to make sure they ended up in quote-unquote good films – that being a very definite distinction back in the pre-Spielberg ‘70s, and one that did not tend to embrace crazy-ass scripts about rampaging Satanists and exploding camper vans.


So what happened? How did they both end up doing this film? Did Fox throw their weight behind producers Wes Bishop and Lee Frost (whose Saber Productions brought us the unforgettable mad scientist/race relations extravaganza The Thing With Two Heads in ’72) before or after the talent was on-board? I have no idea, but I bet there must be a good story behind it.

One thing I do know is that Fonda and Oates were good buddies in real life, so maybe that had something to do with it. The pair played out a close, borderline homoerotic, friendship in Fonda’s excellent directorial debut ‘The Hired Hand’ (which I reviewed here), and as the legend has it they spent much of the early ‘70s palling around off-screen as well, buying land next door to each other in Montana, enjoying a relaxing lifestyle of huntin’, shootin’, fishin’, and no doubt male bonding like crazy.

So with its rural location shooting, rip-roaring action scenes and broadly similar tale of two happy-go-lucky dudes enjoying each other’s company, perhaps the script for ‘Race With The Devil’ simply offered them a fun way to collect a pay cheque whilst continuing to have a good time together (and without requiring them to really knock-one-outta-the-court acting-wise, the way they’d have been expected to do in a ‘serious’ film)..? Pure speculation of course, but who knows. I mean, this was the ‘70s. Maybe they just had Bishop & Frost round for dinner one night, busted out the coke, got talking about this great idea they had for a movie and hey…. y’know how these things go. Before they know it they’re sitting in the camper van, taking direction from biker movie/blaxploitation veteran Jack Starrett, wondering how all this might affect their hopes for an Oscar.


And as to the movie that resulted? Well in spite of the talent and studio backing, Bishop & Frost’s script remains pure boilerplate exploitation, reheating some Satanist paranoia from ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, mixing it up with fresh “rich city folk run into trouble in the country” riffs ala ‘Deliverance’, adding last reel car chase appeal and simmering til lukewarm. With correspondingly bland direction and lesser actors in the lead roles, ‘Race With The Devil’ could easily have been rote schedule filler of the William Girdler / William Grefe variety, but thankfully Starrett steps up to the plate with some surprisingly accomplished filmmaking, and Fonda and Oates can’t help but remain as charismatic as ever, irrespective of their intentions in taking on the project.

With a keen eye on the clock, the movie doesn’t spend a great deal of time on “getting’ to know the characters” type set up, but the stars ease into their roles so naturally it feels like we’ve known them for years. Perhaps drawing on their real life friendship, the dynamic between the two is established with scarcely a word needing to be uttered: Pete is the young(ish) hot-shot pro motorcycle racer, Warren his slightly older, crankier mechanic/garage owner buddy, and all is right with the world.

Oates is boastful and belligerent (bringing back a touch of his character from ‘Two Lane Blacktop’), but also sorta down-at-heel and self-deprecating – he realises he’ll never be as handsome or physically capable as his younger buddy, but that’s damn well not going to stop him trying, bringing his greater wealth and experience into play where necessary. This contest for alpha male status occasionally leads the two to bicker, but they always pull back from a full-scale argument, realising that their friendship is more important than their egos. Isn’t that sweet?


Of course, despite the focus on close male friendship, the film would also like to make clear that there’s nothing funny going on here, ya hear?, and to that end, both men have naturally brought their wives along for the ride. And this sadly is where the movie falls down as a potential character piece or small cast survival drama, simply because neither wife is really ever given the opportunity to develop much of a personality. It’s not that the script paints them as inept or empty-headed or anything, and it’s not the fault of actresses Loretta Swit and Lana Parker, who do a perfectly credible job; it’s just that whilst the men are granted fully fleshed out characters with a believable and interesting relationship, the women remain just.. their wives, sidelined to the extent that by the time we reach the end of the movie it’s still hard to tell them apart – a definitive example of the kind of ‘invisibility’ of married women in babyboomer-era culture that Fonda critiqued so thoughtfully in ‘The Hired Hand’ in fact. Oh well. Can’t exactly blame him for not learning his lesson here I guess, as he’s going to work solely with his ‘actor’ hat on. And like I say, this was the ‘70s. Presumably Swit and Parker’s real life equivalents were busy making sandwiches and rolling joints whilst the boys were yakking up a storm about this crazy movie they were gonna make?


Just as poorly served by the script are the film’s Satanists. Admittedly, the central sacrificial ritual that kick-starts our chase / flight narrative is pretty cool and effectively surprising / violent / chilling (plus I just can’t get over the genre-shredding surreality of seeing Warren Oates in an ill-fitting bobblehat inadvertently stumbling across a black mass – “ooh, they got, uh, some robes, and they’re havin’ themselves a dance..”). Beyond that though, the idea of an omniscient Satanic cult controlling a remote Texas county never quite convinces.

If, as if strongly implied, the cult covertly exercises control over populace and law enforcement within their domain, why do they spend most of the movie playing sneaky ‘cat & mouse’ games with the outsiders who have witnessed their sacrifice, rather than just killing them at the first opportunity? I mean, what’s their game-plan here? Do they think that if they just *scare* these people enough, they won’t bother to mention all the sinister goings-on to anyone once they’re safely over the county line? And also, if the cult exerts such omniscient power in a community of well-fed rednecks and ‘regular folk’ (presumably encompassing local officials, politicians, business leaders etc), how come their big ritual gathering is just some threadbare get together on a bare hillside, attended by a few scrawny hippie types?

Going further, we could also ask why the clerk in an apparently Satanist-affiliated gas station happily sells our heroes a shotgun and ammunition whilst they’re on the run, but… such are the questions you’ve got to contend with when you let the guys who came up with ‘The Thing With Two Heads’ write your script, I suppose.



I guess there probably wasn’t much Jack Starrett could have done to patch up weaknesses in the writing (not really your bag when yr a hired director and your producers wrote the script), but thankfully his work here is solid throughout, keeping things tense and well paced, with imaginative mise en scene, plenty of camera movement, tight cutting, bright colours and effective night shooting, plus lots of incidental local colour and period charm - everything you could ask of a no nonsense bit of commercial cinema really. Along with the quality lead performances, it’s this technical professionalism and directorial suss that goes furthest in helping ‘Race With The Devil’ live up to its unique concept, somewhat transcending its origins as a drive-in timewaster in spite of the script’s inconsistencies.

One element I thought worked really well was the ambiguity of the situations our characters encounter in the aftermath of the ritual. In particular, the scenes in which Fonda and Oates report what they’ve seen to the local sheriff are excellently played. Clearly something is awry with the cops’ flippant attitude and shoddy procedures, but to what extent are they implicated? Are they fully paid up cultists, are they just following the orders of some local bigwig who’s told them to keep clear, or are they simply lazy and inept? Even by the end of the film, we’re not quite sure.** A lot of horror stories tend to overplay their hand when it comes to stuff like this, throwing in some obvious giveaway (Lovecraft did so in just about everything he ever wrote, much as I love him), so to encounter a tale where it’s genuinely difficult to judge the trustworthiness of characters or surroundings is refreshingly unnerving.

As paranoia grows, the uncertainty that results from a mixture of incidents that could maybe, possibly be imaginary (broken phone lines in gas stations, creepy, starin’ locals) and threatening intrusions that are clearly NOT imaginary (snake in the cupboard, murdered pet dog) is well-managed, creating a sense of ever-present threat that would have been immediately dissipated if they’d filled the movie with hooded cultists running around at all hours and dudes with highly suspicious pentagram necklaces and so on.



All such subtleties are out of the window as we approach the high octane conclusion however, and, uh, yeah – the whole car chase sequence is pretty nifty, rip-roaring pre-‘Road Warrior’ fare, delivering on the posters’ promise of some wonderfully gratuitous vehicular destruction. This is the part of the movie that could really have been improved by having some red-robed cultists leaping about the place, but still… I ain’t complaining. Rednecks will do just fine. The ending that follows is a little abrupt - I could easily have gone for another fifteen minutes or so of wanton Satanist bashing – but then, I guess it’s meant to be surprising and abrupt, so, mission accomplished.

In conclusion, ‘Race With the Devil’ might not quite be the heavenly Peter Fonda / Warren Oates Satanist-blasting extravaganza of your dreams, but it’s still a lot of fun, and well worth a look as an example of an unusual, well-made mid ‘70s b-flick. Face it, It’s one of those film you’ve gotta see some time, so might as well grab some beers and get on with it.


*Although it cops out on the Satanist angle, this better known American poster for the movie is perhaps even cooler, and this alternate horror-themed effort is great too.

**Actually that’s not quite true – rewatching the movie to get some screengrabs, I noticed that there’s a brief shot of the sheriff amongst the cultists who surround the motorhome at the finale… but my point still stands I think.