'You're touching the skies with your devil's thighs' (The Devil's Men (DVD))

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	The Devil's Men (DVD)
Date:	13/11/08 (170 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good music, nice locations

Disadvantages: Everything else - this is dreadful

A review of just the film. A DVD is available from amazon, although at £12 it's way too expensive.

This is a horror film from 1976, made in Greece but at least part-funded by a British film company. It really scrapes the bottom of the barrel, and provides a career-low for two venerable British horror stars.

Somewhere in Greece a small town has fallen under the sway of a cult which worships a minotaur statue (the film is also known as Land of the Minotaur). They sacrifice young tourists to their bull-related deity. A nearby priest, Father Roche, has somehow got wind of this and sets out to stop it. This becomes especially urgent when some young friends of his are captured by the cultists...

Boy oh boy, this film stinks. There are precisely two good things about it: the Greek scenery is lovely, and some of the music is effective. (The music's by Brian Eno, of all people. A lot of it is bog standard horror music, just a bit more ambient, but there's a particularly nice bit that sounds kind of like chanting, but also kind of like insects buzzing, that's completely wasted on this garbage). There's also a quite funny song at the end (called 'The Devil's Men'); not sure who did it - certainly not Eno - but it has a pleasing glam/prog feel to it and made me smile.

Everything else is bad. Everything. Think of anything that goes to make up a film, and you can be sure that it's bad in this one. The editing is particularly laughable, dissipating any suspense the sacrifice scenes might have, and showing us the same things over and over whenever anything supposedly dramatic happens. There is no sense of urgency about any of this. The fight scenes are pathetic, the special effects perfunctory. The statue of the minotaur would have just about passed muster in an episode of Pertwee-era Dr Who, but in a feature film it's just insulting.

The acting is also bad. Most characters are played by deservedly-unknown Greek actors (I got quite excited when I realised that one of the kidnapped tourists was the same actor who played the sexual deviant anti-hero in the sleazy, hilarious Island of Death; he isn't very good here, though). There's a New York private investigator summoned to help Father Roche who I hated instantly - his ridiculous macho-man posturing and ludicrous hair make him look more like a Serbian war criminal than a sophisticated man of the world. The chief lady victim is played semi-competently by Luan Peters, a familiar enough face (and body) from various other British exploitation films of the era. Almost everyone is dubbed (I'd guess a lot of them don't speak English too well in real life) and the line delivery is mostly flat and uninspired.

None of which should be too surprising; supporting casts in these kinds of films are usually bad. What really shocks are the two lead performers. Father Roche is played by Donald Pleasence, an often great character actor who did a lot of horror movies in the 70s and 80s. He was always inclined towards hamming it up in inferior material, but here he hardly seems interested, not even keeping his ridiculous Irish accent consistent. And Peter Cushing - an actor who could normally be relied upon to be at least professional - is visibly bored as he walks through the role of the chief cultist. His 'evil cackling' scene possibly represents the worst moment of his entire film career.

The plot and script are abominable. Roche's allies constantly pour scorn on his religious beliefs (why on earth is he friends with them)? There are elementary errors in continuity (letters arrive seemingly without ever being sent; a woman asks Roche to visit her house, doesn't give him the address, and yet he knows where it is anyway). Characters behave suspiciously for no reason other than furthering the plot. Although Roche turns out to be right about all the bad stuff going on, he has to make some pretty wild, unexplained leaps in his logic to figure things out. The ending is one of the lamest I've ever seen, with the cultists proving vulnerable to something which hadn't even been hinted at previously, a bizarrely lazy bit of plotting (even the worst Hammer horrors would include a scene explaining how vampires could be destroyed, so that when the hero did it at the end the audience weren't left scratching their heads).

I'd always been intrigues by the idea of the film, mainly because of its two stars. But it turns out to be just a witless Wicker Man rip-off set in Greece. It has the same pagan emphasis and the same sense of a whole community colluding in a terrible secret. Unfortunately, while The Wicker Man is a well-thought-out masterpiece with generally superb acting, The Devil's Men is worthless, slipshod garbage. It's not even annoying. In fact it's difficult to summon up any feeling for it whatsoever.

There's precious little blood or gore, and while there's a bit of nudity, it's generally inoffensive. This has a 15 certificate. It is absolutely not worth seeing at all.

Summary: A really poor British/Greek horror of the late 70s