'Devil Story' (1986) - Bernard Launois.

The French are, quite rightly, highly regarded for many refined things: filigree literature; brashly over-gesticulating women; risque approaches to personal hygiene, marvellously melty, odoriferous cheeses; cloyingly rich, artery atrophying food. 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; but they don't do horror; and they certainly don’t make remotely credible rock music; with the dubious exception of 'Trust' proving the rule, their rock music is a truly abject experience; which leads me somewhat circuitously to this singular, and wildly incongruous splatter-movie from la Belle B-Movie France! If that arch-poseur, and dramatic, dialectical despot of the New Wave, Godard had masterminded this miraculously turgid time-waster, 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, and 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 post-Hammer, straight-laced Gothic horror (And to avoid further complications, we shan’t discuss ‘Zombie Lake’ here!). 

While the breathlessly bonkers blood-fest, 'Devil Story' remains a profoundly eccentric affair; whether one will actually enjoy it, or not, depends greatly on said splatter-fan's especially low tolerance for all the grain alcohol they absolutely MUST consume prior to viewing this calamitously clumsy creep-show, whilst majestically maintaining an equally robust tolerance for the frightful film's singularly lugubrious pacing, and almost nihilistically nonconformist narrative! There will, perhaps, be those adorably outre oddballs that just LOVE the short pants off it; along with an equal amount of splenetic, irk-faced 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 cinema 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-thinking splatter movie impresarios, Nathan Schiff & Todd Sheets will in all likelihood be the kinda’ terminally trashed, 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!'