Tuesday, October 15, 2019

As opposed to devils of lightness?


I mentioned a few days back that FXM is bringing some classics out of its vaults. There are still movies that have been on the schedule for a while with a bunch of repeats. One of those is Devils of Darkness, which will be onb again tomorrow morning at 3:00 AM and again on October 29.

The movie starts of with a pre-credits scene of a gypsy party in the woods somewhere in Brittany, which ends with one of the gypsies getting killed and somebody saying she's going to be his bride for all of eternity! After the opening credits, we get to a bunch of British tourists at a hotel there, led by Paul (William Sylvester) and Madeleine (Diana Decker). Madeleine knows a lot about the local customs, and suggests her fellow Brits watch the All Souls' Eve rituals.

A couple of the guys, however, would rather go spelunking, and it costs them when they find some coffins in the cave; both wind up dead. The one woman other than Madeleine also winds up dying. Paul vows to have the deaths more thoroughly investigated when he gets back to Britain, since he notices some sort of bite mark on the necks of the two recovered bodies. Also only the way he picks up an odd looking bat pendant.

That last thing is something he shouldn't have done. The pendant is a talisman belonging to Count Sinistre (Hubert Noël), and he needs it to engage in his evil powers. He's been living since 1588, and has a retinue of hangers-on who obey all his commands for whatever reason, I don't know. So Sinistre and his wife Tanis (Carole Gray) go off to England to find the talisman.

Along the way, they use their powers to steal the coffins of the two Brits who died in France, kill a scientist who's helping Paul, and kidnap a woman Karen (Tracy Reed) who is working at Madeleine's antique shop and who Paul falls in love with..

Or something like that. To be honest, Devils of Darkness is a movie that has a whole lot of nothing going on in it. It's not notably bad, but it sure isn't notably good either. It's better than a lot of the other programmers that Fox was distributing at the time, or at least has better production values thanks to the Eastmancolor print. But it's something to watch once and then who knows how long you'll remember it?

Devils of Darkness seems to be available at Amazon from a couple of sketchy-looking DVDs, as well as online streaming.

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