Text and Subtext 19: Devil's Story

Or, What WTF Did I Just Watch???

I’m not sure if I even need to write a review for this one. Seems like the synopsis alone is a good enough selling point:

After their car breaks down in the French countryside, a young couple must fend off a Nazi mutant and his gypsy mother, a mummy and a possessed horse.

I mean…what else is there to say after that?

This is another amazing aspect of 80s and 90s horror - foreign horror which takes all the elements of American and British Horror and jams them together. Now, this isn’t a slam on foreign horror - go back to my Archives and you’ll see I’ve reviewed plenty of foreign horror flicks which worked just fine, and I’m sure I’ll review more.

But this….I mean, words can’t adequately express what happens in this movie. You have a deformed mutant Nazi (the only way we know he’s a Nazi is he’s wearing an old SS jacket, and by “deformed,” I mean “wearing a rubber mask bought at the Five and Dime”) randomly slaughtering people along desolate countryside roads (The Hills Have Eyes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc, etc…), a haunted British galleon that supposedly crashed off the coast with cursed cargo (The Fog), one of which is freaking mummy, and a possessed black horse. Which mostly just runs around and screams a lot.

Also…a demonic black cat, for some reason. Like the cat in Alien?

Oh, and the deformed Nazi mutant’s mom - a gypsy - is trying to bury her recently dead daughter, who oddly looks exactly like the main female protagonist, but wearing a weird black wig (because it’s the same actress), and the mummy eventually wanders into this graveyard and raises this dead girl to life, cause….reasons? Maybe he’s lonely, and wants to party?

And the ending is clearly going for that surreal, dreamy quality found in the best of Fulci’s and Argento’s Italian horror flicks….but it comes off more like “Bobby in the shower, on the season finale of Dallas.”

However, it’s great fun, in its own way. These folks were obviously very proud of their gore affects (especially the pumping artery gimmick) because they zoomed in on those A LOT, and after a while, you’re just caught up in the insanity of all. Check it out on Tubi.