The Devil Rides Out

The Devil Rides Out deals in some of the usual Hammer Films tropes, but adds a spin with its roaring 20s setting and by making an actor who is usually the villain into the hero. Also known as The Devil's Bride, the film was based on a novel by Dennis Wheatley.

Christopher Lee usually played a bad guy--hell, the baddest of guys--but he was equally as effective as a hero. He gives the comforting feeling that, whatever evil is coming your way, Christopher Lee knows it well and will shut it down. Oddly, this is kind of accurate: During World War II, Lee was a member of the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare--also known as the Special Operations Executive, an actual unit, dedicated to taking out Nazis by means that were... well, sometimes rather ungentlemanly. He was also six-foot-five and a direct descendant of Charlemagne.

But things kick right off with a set of opening credits that could easily be a heavy metal video if you just swapped out the soundtrack (perhaps one of Lee's own, as he had a late-in-life career as a heavy metal vocalist and was apparently a big Black Sabbath fan). Another twist to The Devil  Rides Out is that it's set in roaring 20s Britain and Satanism is just another lark for upper-class Bright Young Things.

The Duc de Richleau, aka Christopher Lee shows up to visit a friend who is hosting a "meeting" or his "astronomical society." Yeah, you ain't fooling the Duc, who has been around all the blocks, many times. Of course the meeting is actually a congregation of devil worshippers, led by none other than Charles Gray, whom you know from Diamonds Are Forever and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Here he is Mocata, the utterly unctuous leader of the local Satanic coven.

"Chickens in a basket, diagrams on a floor. Do these mean something to you?"

Rather like those in The Black Cat, it's one classy, well-dressed group of Satanists--the manor house is gorgeous, the patter is literary and the wine exquisite, and the crowd is strictly black tie and pearls, with the occasional dashiki or sari. But Christopher Lee feels nothing but disdain, as those who are "meddling with black magic" rank about as high in his esteem as Nickelback fans.

Christopher Lee waves off the devil worshippers and carries off his wanabe Satanist pal, but he's going to have to rout this bunch of vermin from the neighborhood. Any gentleman would. Really, it is interesting that The Devil Rides Out chooses as its main combatant against evil, not some radiant creature of pure goodness, but a guy who seems to know exactly what he's up against because he's been there and rolls his eyes at your puerile edgelord nonsense. You think you're a powerful mage summoning Baphomet to do your most vile and stygian bidding, to Christopher Lee you're just a spotty teen playing Marilyn Manson loud until mom makes you a Hot Pocket.

Yet another of the main differences between The Devil Rides Out and your typical Satanist horror flick is that it almost entirely dodges the conventional Judeo-Christian angle for a more ego-centered version. When he goes off on the power of his will, it's not hard to hear the distaff Alestier Crowley` philosophy. It's a choice more suitable to the film's 1920s setting as well as the post-hippie/summer of Manson period in which it was released. (I bet Jimmy Page loves this movie.)

According to the Duc de Christopher Lee, "the power of darkness is more than superstition. it is a living force that can be tapped at any given moment of the night." Something like William S. Burroughs' "ugly spirit," that malevolent force that touches some more than others, and which one must struggle to control, regardless of whether one is suppressing or focusing its darkness.

So, anyhow, the deal is that Duc de Christopher Lee's buddy is in love with this girl who's already engaged to the devil--ergo the movie's stateside title, The Devil's Bride--and Charles Gray has to make sure that nothing interferes with getting her to the church--or coven--on time. One of the ways Charles Gray tries to keep his Satanic wedding planner mojo going is by causing a rather groovy car chase with old timey cars: His eyes appear in your review mirror and next thing you know you're driving a perfectly lovely Buick Roadster off the road and getting your cloche all askew.

So Christopher Lee has to disrupt the Satanic baptism--Baptism before wedding because, hey, we're Satanists!--which he seems to be intent upon disrupting not just because it involves sacrificing souls to evil incarnate, but because it's so damned tacky. I swear that as he drives his Hispano Suzia into the center of a group of frolicking devil worshippers, he's not only chanting prayers, but muttering something about "cheap Woodstock knockoff" and "ill-fitting hospital gowns" and various maledictions against those who would drink Captain Morgan's.

"As part of one's initiation, one has to choose the name of some past great practitioner of the occult."
Oooh! Can I be Jayne Mansfield?

"The goat of Mendes! The devil himself!"

Some friends come by to visit for not other apparent reason than to supply the plot with a child to be sacrificed to Satan later--meetings, baptisms, weddings, sacrifices... I can see why one has to be upper-class to belong to this coven. One would have to be independently wealthy to have enough free time--not to mention all of the appropriate outfits--for the many mandatory activities.

Charles Gray stops by to be all shady and mind-control-y. "In magic there is neither good nor evil, there is merely a science. The science of causing change to happen merely through one's will." When his cover his blown, he flounces out, proclaiming, "I shall not be back. But something will." Could be a campy British closet case or an Avon lady, could be a bomb cyclone or a giant spider, who knows...

The climax is when Duc Lee Richleau and his cronies do some kind of magic circle thing in the library to ward of an attack by Macaca that involves wind, lightning, bats and giant spiders. And you know what's worse than giant spiders? The Angel of Death! Okay, maybe nothing is worse than giant spiders, but it's still all kinds of bad stuff...

"Don't look at the eyes!" Lee does a lot of telling people not to look at shit, or not to leave someone alone or not to turn off the light or not to remove the crucifix and they always do. Why? I have no idea: If Christopher Lee tells you to do shit, you fucking do it. Fortunately Christopher Lee can pretty much always shut evil down, since he's a 12th level magic user, as well as a 7th level fighter--and his character in The Devil Rides Out clearly has a number of mystical powers as well...

I'd rather see you dead than meddling with black magic!

This is really the big scene of the film. Sure, everyone rushes over to disrupt the human sacrifice of some woman's daughter and flip off Charles Gray but that's basically a bunch of deus ex machina and an improbable happy ending. Because even more ridiculous than "it was all a dream" is "We time-traveled back to right before all of this happened."

The Devil Rides Out is a relatively short, fast-moving horror film and one wishes it had spent a little more time developing its unorthodox Crowley-esque vision of Satanism and the humanist magic Lee uses to defeat--or at least thwart--it.

And, well, they had Charles Gray and Christopher Lee to put this over. I would sit and watch those two recite the phone book or the dialogue from an Adam Sandler movie--much less act imperious and make dismissive gestures while reciting the names of Egyptian gods and random bits of Latin.

Overall, The Devil Rides Out is a solid horror flick--it may be light on the scares, but it makes up for it with atmosphere, characterization and a unique take on an old topic. Also, it's got Christopher Lee. And, even with 280 entries on the man's IMDB page, there's never enough of that.

Bruce Campbell

"... The first movie, we had no idea we would even finish the thing. It was a four-year slog just to get it done. And an even longer slog to return the money to the investors. Nobody broke even for about 10 years on that project—none of it was a slam dunk. People forget, Army of Darkness went well over budget; it bombed, and so they killed the franchise.... "

I interviewed the man, the myth, the legend, Bruce Campbell for Vegas Seven.

Ted V. Mikels

"... That kind of dedication powered filmmaker Ted V. Mikels, who once said he’d like to be remembered as 'a hell of a filmmaker who did 28 hours a day, 10 days a week toward the making of films.' Mikels directed 25 movies over the course of five decades, from 1963’s Strike Me Deadly to 2015’s Paranormal Extremes: Text Messages from the Dead..."

An appreciation of Ted V. Mikels for Vegas Seven.

Spirits of the Dead

You want some serious Euro filmic decadence from the birth of the sexual revolution? Step right this way to a period piece that adapts short stories you may have read in high school...

Spirits of the Dead adapts three tales from Edgar Allan Poe and was part of the trend for anthology films than ran from the mid-60s to mid-70s, which included such highlights as Torture Garden, Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (which is actually a train) and Tales of Terror (which also took Poe as its an inspiration and had Vincent Price to boot). In Spirits of the Dead, Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini each adapted a short story--the title is taken from a poem. It should surprise no one that that the last contribution is the best, but each of the others has something to recommend them as well.

Opening the film is "Metzengerstein," the offering from Roger Vadim which, like pretty much any Vadim film, is a showcase for the hot blonde he was banging at the time, in this case Jane Fonda.

As decadent aristocrat the Countess Frederica, Jane looks absolutely gorgeous in an array of costumes that combine thigh boots and bared navels with slashed sleeves and ruffled collars. (I swear that John Galliano must absolutely adore this film. Whether he knows it or not.) Not to mention the hair. The hair is to die for. RuPaul and Dolly Parton would tussle over that hair... courtesy of ace Eurostylist of the 60s Carita, BTW.

Of course, all this flash--Wine! Orgies! Daggers! Corsets! Baby leopards!--doesn't conceal that pretty much nothing happens in "Metzengerstein." We watch Fonda stomp around in her outfits like Beyonce until she runs across Baron Wilhelm..

Baron Wilhelm is played by Jane's brother Peter--in the story they're supposed to be cousins, but apparently that wasn't incestuous enough for the French. He barely speaks, which is supposed to be because he's even moodier than Jane is, but I'm pretty sure it's actually because his French sucks (remember that Peter spent his teen years getting high; Jane spent hers going to Vassar and working at Paris Review).

 The showgirl headdress existed even in Medieval times...

Anyway, Jane gets pissed, sets Peter's stables on fire, Peter dies, a big black horse shows up in her tapestry and in her stables, then more shit catches on fire, etc. etc. etc...

"William Wilson" is the entry by Louis Malle, a variation on the Doppleganger story--except in this version, it's a good double that keeps thwarting the evil original. Wilson is played by Alain Delon, who projects just the right level of icily dispassionate cruelty, qualities the real Delon, a notorious asshole, apparently possessed in spades.

 

We watch William Wilson torment both his teachers and classmates, even as a child--or, should we say, attempt to, because it seems that another, identical boy named William Wilson constantly shows up to put a stop to his efforts at sadism, whether its pulling a bullied classmate out of a barrel full of rats or calling a halt to an "autopsy" on a live girl.

 

Out of the three stories, Malle comes the closest to giving the people what they (allegedly) want--creepy rats, icky autopsies, bare boobs, titillating flogging scenes--though the idea that the supposedly monstrous "other" is actually a force for good throw it off-balance a bit.. Actually, Spirits of the Dead does not have that much horror in it--there's a sort of ghost/possession in the first story and the double in the second one but the third if just sort of hallucinatory,  which we will get to in a moment...

The theoretical climax of "William Wilson" comes with Brigitte Bardot in a black wig smoking a cigar--Brigitte is great at what she does, but she's one of the last people i'd ever cast as an ersatz Lola Montez. (Ava Gardner, on the other hand, was born for to play Lola and it's amazing no one ever had her do it--imagine how much better the Ophuls Lola Montez would be with her rather than that pretty waxwork, Martine Carol. But i digress..)

Anyway, Bardot throws shade on Delon and beats him at cards, then suddenly he starts winning and winds up, quite literally winning her. He whips Brunette Brigitte, then is about to have his buddies gang bang her, when the good William Wilson shows up and reveals that bad William Wilson fucking cheated. That Wilson bullies, tortures, rapes--but suffers no real comeuppance until he cheats his cronies at cards is still appropriate to today...

Our last and most impressive entry is Fellini's "Toby Dammit," ostensibly based on Poe's "Never Bet the Devil Your Head," but only in the most tenuous fashion.

From the opening airport pan--a mass of shifting color tints, distorted soundscapes, leering faces and cardboard cutouts (no, literally, cardboard cutouts)--we know we're in Fellini territory. If 8 1/2 is the tale of the director's meltdown and La Dolce Vita is the writer's, "Toby Dammit" is the actor. with the identity crisis turning out that much worse. (If "Metzengerstein" and "William Wilson" are the Poe surly teen goths read, "Toby Dammit" is the actual Poe reeling around Baltimore drunk, deranged and dying. Fonda and Delon play sadistic assholes, Stamp is a troubled artist.)

We get herds of nuns, flashbulb-ing paparazzi, traffic jams, all reeled out as character-packed mod-Bosch canvases under Inferno-red skies. Toby is in town to make a western retelling of the story of Christ, for which he will we receive a Ferrari, more specifically a golden Ferrari 330 LMB. (What would Jesus drive?)

Stamp staggers through a purgatorial television talk show, distracted by multiple cameras and multiple hosts,alternately morose and grandiose, playing it up to the hilt for a disapproving and fascinated audience.

The awards banquet is your standard Fellini party scene with Toby in full tailspin. He attains an odd moment of lucidity reciting a monologue from Macbeth onstage, giving a glimpse of the talent he's droned in drink and drugs (there's more than a dash of The Richard Burton Story here.)

 

Finally, Toby gets his sweet sportscar and we're off! He whizzes to the outskirts of the city to a small town. The joy of speed gives way to the realization that he's lost and cannot find his way back. (It kind of reminds me of them time i got lost in Detroit somewhere between Hamtramck and downtown, just turning endlessly along unlit, overgrown roads, hoping I didn't run out of gas before sundown. Then I found a little bulletproof-glassed minimart in the middle of nowhere and a bunch of really nice guys gave me directions back.)

 

Toby keeps driving in that beautiful Ferrari, a one-man car chase, speeding along until a succession of dead ends, turnarounds, roundabouts and plazas repeatedly bring him to a halt. The town has somehow folded in on him and, no matter where he turns, he can't seem to get out. And the cardboard cutouts are closing in again...

... and it falls down and goes boom...

Spirits of the Dead isn't quite a horror film, though it does have a few cringe-inducing moments and the Fellini installment is creepy in its own peculiar way. But for atmosphere and style, it's a movie that's hard to beat.