'Devil Story' (1986) - Bernard Launois.

The French are, quite rightly, highly regarded for many refined things: filigree literature, risque approaches to personal hygiene, marvellously melty, odoriferous cheeses, and cloyingly rich, artery atrophying cuisine. Their blissful pastries, all salaciously seeped in oleaginous buttery-goodness are, quite literally to die for, and that rotten, rutting rapscallion Serge Gainsbourg’s pervy, screwball funk is A-okay with me, baby! The French don't do horror, and they certainly don’t make credible rock music, with the dubious exception of 'Trust' proving the rule, their rock music remains a truly abject experience. This digression leads me circuitously to Launois's singular, and wildly incongruous splatter-movie from la Belle B-Movie France...Devil Story! If Godard, that arch-poseur, and dramatically dialectical despot of the New Wave had masterminded this miraculously turgid brainfart, it would no doubt be hailed as an absurdist triumph of the macabre, but he didn't, so they don't! Gallic horror is at best, an oxymoron, while I ADORE Jean Rollin, I consider him to be an elegiac poet of sublimely erotic, darkly psychedelic, grave-steeped weirdness, rather than a purveyor of straight-laced, post-Hammer Gothic horror (And to avoid further complications, we shan’t discuss ‘Zombie Lake’ here either!). 

This breathlessly bonkers blood-fest is a profoundly eccentric affair, whether one will actually enjoy it, or not, depends greatly on said splatter-fan's low tolerance for all the grain alcohol they MUST consume prior to viewing this calamitously clumsy creep-show, whilst maintaining an equally robust tolerance for the lugubrious pacing, and almost nihilistically nonconformist narrative! There will, perhaps, be those adorably outre oddballs that just LOVE the short pants off Devil Story, along with an equal amount of irked individuals that won't, c’est la vie, fromage fiends! My pants are short, due to uncommonly stumpy legs, and I am a rabidly self-confessed ‘adorable oddball’, whose tolerance for grotty B-horror ephemera ala' merde is epically vast and embracing, so I can say, being only partially medicated, that I heartily grooved on this schizo-splatter offering for ALL the wrong reasons! The more zealous aficionados of no-budget, independent splatter movie impresarios Nathan Schiff & Todd Sheets will in all likelihood be the kinda’ sensationally skewed, trash movie-stewed, slime-encrusted celluloid worshipping freaks that shall righteously dig on Gallic gore gourmand Bernard Launois's devilishly demented midnight movie offering the most!!!!

 

 

'Barbara Striesand keepin' it real for the Grammys!'

'I'm gonna party like it was 2020!'

'Massive head trauma gave me purpose, dude!'

'We had ourselves some good times, baby!'

'Unwrap me later, it'll be worth it!'