Summary: It's Dennis Wheatley Hammer week on Dickens of a Blog! This time, To the Devil a Daughter, the movie that lets you see Christopher Lee's ass and a 14-year-old give reverse birth to a bloody hand puppet. QUALITY!
BLOT: (12 Feb 2015 - 09:27:27 AM)
To the Devil a Daughter (1976)
Why not finish up my Hammer-made-Dennis-Wheatley-movie-adaptations theme week with the other one? To the Devil a Daughter—a title displayed with various degrees of punctuation—is a 1976 movie and one of last movies put out by old-Hammer (sometimes called the final Hammer movie but there seems to have been another). As a sum of its parts, the overall film is a fair failure scraping whatever degree of fame it has through a few key moments, generally due to shock factor: a drawn out painful birth scene, an uncomfortable orgy featuring Christopher Lee's ass and Denholm Eliot's o-face, the actually sort of excellent bloody hand puppet, and having a young teen's nudity as a temptation for the hero (spoiler: the sexual titillation in this movie is almost all down to said young teen, with her near-see-through nightie in a few shots and a "reverse birth" played up semi-sexually). The direction is intriguing, hitting a few Suspiria-like moments a year before Suspiria, and the odd timing helps to slam hone a nightmare consistency, but pretty much any character not played by Christopher Lee, Richard Widmark (who was the best bit for me, with his American-no-nonsense delivery), or Nastassja Kinski feels unnecessary. And Lee hams it up. The plot melts down and is unnecessarily padded—even though it doesn't make it to the 90-minute-mark—and the direness of Satanism is muddled by unconvincing New Age babble that should have been better constructed. Had they worked on the plot some, made the characters a bit more necessary, and figured out which philosophical flavor of Satanism they wanted to go with, it could have worked. As it is, it's a few good elements held down by the weight of its bad.
Horror Movies
OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: February 2015
