Let the sabbat now begin! (To The Devil A Daughter (DVD))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	To The Devil A Daughter (DVD)
Date:	16/01/08 (121 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A generally good cast in a decent film

Disadvantages: The leading man and the ending let the side down

A review of the Hammer Collection DVD.

This was Hammer's last film. Released in 1976, it was the last gasp of a company that had which had slipped out of fashion as horror trends moved on and they didn't. After this they managed to churn out a TV series, but there were no more real Hammer horrors.

The hero, John Verney, is a writer of occult thrillers (the film is based on an occult thriller by Dennis Wheatley). He ends up looking after a young nun, Catherine, who belongs to a church full of stop-at-nothing Satanists. They want her for their own fell purposes, of course, but instead of turning to the church, say, or even the police, Verney is helped out by his agent and her boyfriend. Can Verney find out what the Satanists are up to in time to stop them?

To their credit, Hammer's last film is a concerted effort to move away from their familiar old gothic style. It's set in modern London, so no period costumes or wobbly castle sets. The music is severely reined in and the colour scheme, although Technicolor, is restrained. They even manage some foreign location filming. They were trying to tap into the popularity of films like The Exorcist or Rosemary's Baby, but even in 1976 Hammer look like they're making films from another era. Apart from a couple of scenes, there's nothing here to match the kind of visceral nastiness of The Exorcist.

This has Hammer's best cast ever (there was a lot of money available from various co-production companies). Verney is played by a bona fide Hollywood star, albeit a rather old one. Richard Widmark had been in a bunch of film noirs back in the 40s and 50s, even if he's far from well known today. He was reportedly unhappy about working on this film, and it shows in his listless performance. He bears a strong resemblance to a Star Wars figure I used to own ('Prune Face', but with hair and no eyepatch). He brings none of the camp enthusiasm to the film that Bette Davis brought to her OAP horror roles, and is a bit of a liability.

But the rest of the cast are top notch. Christopher Lee, as the chief Satanist, gives one of his better performances. He manages to be genuinely sinister, and his shark-like grin is used to great effect in various scenes. Denholm Elliott is fabulous, as he always was, as a boozy shambles of a lapsed Satanist. Honor Blackman and Anthony Valentine are good as Verney's friends, making their characters and their relationship likeable enough. Frances de la Tour even turns up in a brief comic role, and Foggy out of Last of the Summer Wine appears as a librarian.

Young Catherine is played by Nastassia Kinski before she became famous. She's pretty good, although the character requires a level of ambiguity that she can't quite manage. She does do a full frontal nude scene, which was wildly exciting when I was a teenager, although it turns out that she was, at most, 16 when she made the film, so probably shouldn't have been letting it all hang out (and some sources claim she was as young as 14. Yoinks!) Her dad, krazy Klaus, was apparently considered for the film too, but was deemed too unstable to be worth the risk. Shame.

The director was Peter Sykes, who made a few other Hammer films (including the inventive Demons of the Mind). The direction does have a few more ambitious and imaginative touches than was usually the case, although they do rather stand out, as most of the film is reasonably ordinary in that respect. As with Hammer's other Dennis Wheatley adaptation, The Devil Rides Out, the story is more of a thriller than a horror film, consisting of Bond-style chases in which the gadgets are magical, rather than anything that makes a sustained effort to be scary. Apart from one nasty childbirth scene there's nothing even remotely horrifying here (and that scene works as much because of Christopher Lee's acting as anything else). It doesn't let the audience know what's happening for quite a while, which I found mildly annoying - this is not the kind of film that needs to try and play silly buggers with its plotting. And the dreadfully clumsy way that no one seems to know what All Hallows' Eve is surely disqualifies the film from any pretensions about its own intelligence.

This is one of the few Hammers that still gets an 18 certificate. There are a few genuinely nasty bits. There's even a sequence (in which a skinned baby hand puppet smears blood all over Ms Kinski's body double's nether regions) which lapses into undeniable bad taste. As such, it's probably my favourite scene in the film, because of its peculiar wrongness and sheer ineptitude. Oh, and there's a Satanic orgy, too - this is a first for Hammer, in that it shows actual humping and what looks like some fairly explicit lesbianics. Unfortunately a stunt double did Christopher Lee's sex scene - like Britt Eckland in the Wicker Man, we don't get to see the star's real arse.

The main problem with the film, apart from the lack of horror atmosphere, is that it has probably the worst ending of any film Hammer made. It's a muddle - the original ending was vetoed for unknown reasons and they had to try and cobble something together from available footage. It's a stunning anticlimax. Which is a shame, because prior to that, even if the horror content is low and the leading man appalling, the film is still a decently entertaining, reasonably fast moving thriller.

The disk has a few extras. There's a trailer which isn't too bad, although as always it gives things away that it shouldn't. There's a 25 minute documentary about the making of the film, which is pretty good - it includes interviews with Christopher Lee (who seems to believe in Satanism), Honor Blackman, Anthony Valentine, the director and other backstage people. There are some very funny anecdotes about what a jerk Richard Widmark was. And there's a few minutes of interview with Christopher Lee's stunt double at a horror convention in which he describes his stunt work on this film, including a hilarious description of the orgy sequence.

Amazon offers this for £6. It's also available as part of the 21-film Hammer Collection (HMV still has it on sale for a very reasonable £40). It's not essential viewing by any means, but it's a decent enough supernatural thriller, and is worth a look next time it turns up on telly.

Summary: Hammer's last hurrah