The first ten minutes or so of Devil Story is enough to qualify it as some kind of demented work of genius. A misshapen guy who looks like a melted marshmallow in a Nazi uniform, runs around the countryside indiscriminately stabbing people. The funniest bit occurs when a stranded motorist asks the clearly unhinged individual for directions and gets stabbed for his troubles.
Meanwhile, another stranded motorist almost gets struck by lightning and imagines a cat attacking her. Then, she and her boyfriend go to a castle to spend the night with a couple of old coots who tell longwinded flashbacks about the town’s history involving pirate ships running aground.
It was right about this time I began to get nervous. It was here I thought the movie was going to start to run out of gas. Luckily, Devil Story still some nutty WTF lunacy left in the tank.
You see, a horse gets loose and runs into a field where a toy pirate ship pushes through a little sand dune. The audience was probably supposed to think it was the presumably regular-sized pirate ship the old couple was talking about as it began breaking through a mountain. The fact is it looks like a four-year-old filmmaker’s backyard homemade version of Fitzcarraldo.
That is to say, it’s awesome!
Then there’s the scene where the wayward horse encounters our bald antagonist and gets into a fist fight (hoof fight?) with him. When the horse kicks the baddie in the stomach, it causes him to puke blood for two straight minutes. As Martin Scorsese would say: “Cinema!”
Devil Story is one of those movies where the kitchen sink approach yields uneven, but sometimes hilarious results. Like, I couldn’t tell if the bad guy was supposed to be wearing a Halloween mask or he was supposed to look like that, and the make-up was just piss-poor. (It turned out to be a case of the latter.) Or like just when you think things can’t get any weirder, a mummy shows up. Because of that, Devil Story is sort of review-proof. Sure, it’s bad, but depending on your mileage, this could be a minor camp classic.
I mean, I originally was going to give it ** ½. However, the day after I watched it, some people at work asked me if I had seen anything good lately. So, I told them about Devil Story. Folks, the LOOKS my co-workers gave me when I was just describing the plot makes it worth ***.
No comments:
Post a Comment