• Directed by Robert Fuest
• Written by Gabe Essoe, James Ashton and Gerald Hopman
• Starring
  • Ernest Borgnine
  • Eddie Albert
  • William Shatner
  • Keenan Wynn
  • Tom Skerritt

I think sometimes we forget, in our age of DVDs and VOD and all the other personal-sized media options, what a qualitatively distinct experience seeing a feature film in the theater can be, especially a feature made before the home video revolution, and thus not constructed with the little screen as well as the big screen in mind. In this case, I’m sure that some of the scenes in The Devil’s Rain were quite effective when seen projected on a screen thirty feet tall. Desert settings provide a stark and striking backdrop almost without directorial effort. And one can only imagine the impact to audiences of Ernest Borgnine’s face, tricked out as His Satanic Majesty, filling the entire field of vision.

But bereft of the power of oversized spectacle and brought into your home as a tame thing on a DVD, it’s easier than ever to see what an ungodly (hah!) mess of a movie this is.

“I can’t understand why attendance isn’t better. We’ve got plenty of parking…”

One really doesn’t even need to look past the credits to accurately gauge the bombastic hoopla to come. While Ernest Borgnine has indeed been in some good movies, has he ever been in a good movie where he received first billing? And to follow him, we have William Shatner, Tom Skerritt, Eddie Albert, Keenan Wynn… and some punk kid, little more than a glorified and unrecognizable extra, named John Travolta. Also listed is a credit for Satanist-showman Anton Lavey as “technical advisor,” which is a little like turning to Dan Brown to lend legitimacy to your Leonardo Da Vinci biopic. And all of this is presented against a backdrop of images culled from Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights tryptych — the “hell” segment, naturally. I don’t know that Northern Renaissance artwork really sets the mood for a movie about Puritan Satanism transplanted in the present day into the American Southwest, but then again, if any two elements in this movie fit together, I’d probably choke on my Doritos.

So. The American Southwest, in the middle of a raging rainstorm. At the Preston family ranch, Ma Preston (Ida Lupino), old simple farmhand John, and eldest son Mark (William Shatner) wait impatiently for the family patriatch, who’s caught out there in the storm somewhere. (Note Shatner’s entry, as he returns from searching for Dad: He enters against the storm backwards, then turns around to the audience. I remark upon this only because it’s one of Shatner’s old stagecraft tricks, and if you know to look for it, you see him doing that in a lot of his movies. I’m such a geek.)

The good news is that Dad (George Sawaya) does show up on his own. The bad news is that he’s an eyeless, possessed thing, relaying a message from one Corbis that he wants his book back, and he’s waiting in the abandoned mining town of Redstone. Then the Dad-thing bubbles and melts away into a puddle of sherbet. Ma is insistent that what they saw wasn’t actually Pa Preston, and it seems she may be right when Pa’s truck pulls up out front. But when Mark goes out to see if Dad is okay, there’s no one in the truck cab, and sudden crashes sound from inside the house. Mark rushes back to find old John beaten, and Mom gone. But whoever came for her, they didn’t get the book they seek, an old leatherbound volume hidden in a panel in the floor, nor do they get the protective amulet that goes with it.

“The overdue fines alone… why, they’ll be — staggering!“

Come morning, Mark is out at Redstone, drinking in the spooky ghost-town ambiance. There he runs into Corbis (Borgnine), and it’s a battle of bombastic actors talking metaphysics in cowboy hats. Their conversation runs to cryptic declarations about faith and challenges and such; it’s one of those “you probably need to be smoking what the writers were smoking” scenes.

To shake him, Corbis leads Mark into the town’s boarded-up church, which has been transformed into a Satanic shrine, complete with robed parishioners in the pews and a goat’s-head stained-glass window behind the altar. (They’ve even got a pipe organ!) Despite his protestations of faith and courage, Mark starts to freak, and quotes garbled sections of the Lord’s Prayer against Corbis’ ode to Lucifer. The final straw is seeing Ma Preston, now transformed into an eyeless minion. He rushes from the church; and when Corbis’ Satanic illusion makes him see his protective amulet as a snake around his neck, he throws it from himself, and it’s not too long before he’s a captive of Minionville. (Shatner in chains! You know you want it!)

In other words, it’s time to find ourselves a new protagonist. That would be the Prestons’ other son, Tom (Tom Skerritt), who’s a parapsychological researcher in Big Cityland. His wife, Julie (Joan Prather), is herself a psychic sensitive, and both are under the coaching influence of parapsychology legend Dr. Richards (Eddie Albert). When Tom gets word that his family has disappeared (concurrent with Julie’s fragmentary visions of something terrible happening to them), he and Julie hightail it back home, where the apologetic sheriff (Keenan Wynn) can’t help them search because his men are stretched thin cleaning up the aftermath of the storm. So Tom and Julie head off to Redstone on their own.

Despite being a parapsychologist, Tom’s really got no feel for the occult. They wander into town and take a gander in the now-deserted church, hunting rifle at the ready. They take in the stained-glass window, and the huge inverted-pentagram tapestry on the back wall, but it’s only when Julie reads the inscription on the altar — Rege Satanis — that he exclaims, “Devil worship!” Really? You think?

Have I ever been able to resist a Visine joke? No, I have not.

Then their car explodes, to prove that these Satanists are BAD, you know, and then someone (Travolta!) tries to run them down in Mark’s car. Tom chases him into the town’s abandoned hotel, there’s a scuffle, and then… Then we stop the action for Julie to have a sepia-toned expositive vision, which finally gives us some clue, at least, of what’s going on.

Seems that Corbis was a Puritan a few centuries back, and a Satanist as well. He recruited several people of the colony to his infernal master, recording their names in blood in his big old book, including Martin Fife (Shatner again) and his wife. But Mrs. Fife stole the book, because… um… You know, even though Corbis blathered on about how important the book was, I don’t know why it was so necessary for him to keep ahold of it. Maybe the contracts with Satan would be null and void if the book were destroyed, but that then leaves the question open as to why the good guys never destroyed it. Anyway, Corbis (and the Fifes, and others of the wee coven) were eventually burned at the stake, with Corbis giving the expected curse from the coals, proclaiming that he’d be back for the descendants of those who betrayed him, and to get his book!

All of which is very decent of director Robert Fuest to finally lay on us; it’s nice to have a clue once in a while about the movie you’re watching. Of course, Julie never manages to tell Tom any of what she just saw — once she’s out of her trance, she just shakes it off and they drive away in Mark’s car.

And then, just to set up a final conflict, Tom decides he’s gotta go back to Redstone because… you know, because men do these things. So while he hikes back to Redstone with the gun, Julie keeps driving for home, until eyeless Mom pops up out of the back seat and they go off the road. (Hey, don’t blame Mom. She was just looking for a quiet spot for a lie-down, and next thing you know the car’s plowing into hotels and stopping and starting all over…)

When Tom gets back to the ghost town, he’s just in time to see the outdoor ceremony which uses wax dolls and such to transform Mark into an empty-eyed minion with Martin Fife’s soul possessing him. Oh, and this is the scene in which Corbis finally “devils out” and becomes Satan. Or something. It really doesn’t make much sense (I know, I should have had that expectation knocked out of me by now); one second Corbis is calling on Lucifer to manifest himself, the next he’s got latex all over his face and horns curling out of his wig, but he’s still referring to Satan in the third person. Extreme Makeover: Demonic Edition? I dunno.

“Boogah! Boogedah-boogedah! Bwah-hah!”

Tom has gotten to see all of this via the standard trick of stealing a robe from somewhere and blending in among the minions. Then someone — Travolta again! — notices that he still has his eyeballs, and Tom has to run through the town, fighting random Satanists as if he were playing a video game, until he escapes.

By daylight the next day, Tom is home, Julie is still missing, and Dr. Richards has arrived for added support. It seems that Dr. Richards’ entire role was included because Julie’s vision wasn’t sufficiently expository. Heck, Tom didn’t even know about the family’s hidden book until old John pulled it out and showed it to Dr. Richards, who then turns around and explains it to Tom. (The Prestons told their son who was a farmer, but didn’t tell the son who was a parapsychologist??) Of course, by “exposition,” I mean “talking a lot about background stuff,” but not necessarily “explaining anything.” it’s an odd paradox that those movies which spend the most time in exposition seem to still make the least sense.

And back out to Redstone one more time, at night again, where Julie is being prepped for sacrifice, because that’s what captive females are used for. Dr. Richards finally finds the movie’s namesake, hidden in the floor of the old church: “The devil’s rain.” It’s a phrase used in Corbis’ book, and what it refers to is a big bottly thing with Satanic sculptures attached, filled with the souls Corbis has entrapped. (Ooh, lookit them scratch at the inside of the glass, like General Zod in the Phantom Zone!) The storytelling acumen of the entire movie can be encapsulated in this single unanswered question: Why is a bottle of souls called “the devil’s rain”?

I’ve led you through most of this movie, as is my habit when plots are too nonsensical to lend themselves easily to summary, but let’s just cut to the chase, shall we? Corbis is about to sacrifice one and all, until Dr. Richards convinces Martin Fife in Mark’s body to smash the devil’s rain to free himself and all of the captives. He does so, things explode, and the minions all start melting. And melting. And melting. Yes, it’s an impressive set of visual effects, but not nearly as captivating as director Fuest seems to think, if the steady five-minute parade of meltdown shots is any indication. Then there’s a shocker ending that elicits no reaction so much as “What the hell?” — an impressive accomplishment, as most of the preceding movie has done its best to beat the viewer’s expectation of story logic into a coma. The end.

Bet those Vulcan inner eyelids would come in handy now, huh?

It’s hard to summarize all of the blundering missteps in a movie that could and should have been straightforward and effective. Why did we have to keep switching protagonists, from Mark to Tom and then, when Tom proved ineffectual in the last act, to Dr. Richards as the stop-gap? If it’s so important that Corbis never get this book again, why wasn’t it simply destroyed sometime in the last four centuries? Why is Corbis finally back for the book now? What IS Corbis anyway — a possessed descendant of the original Corbis? A spectre with the illusion of flesh? Does he become Satan in some way, or channel him, or merely manifest some extreme form of hero worship? Who decided that “devil’s rain” is a good term for a bottle o’souls?

Sure, it’s fun to watch craggy’n'lumpy Borgnine as the Devil’s agent on earth, so much so that his hornified appearance later in the flick is pretty much overkill. And hearing William Shatner scream like a little girl is always good fun. But The Devil’s Rain could be condensed to thirty minutes (even keeping all ten minutes of melting minions) without sacrificing any of its rudimentary coherence.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 11, plus a couple dozen minions
• breasts: 0 (not going to count all the nipples in the Bosch painting)
• explosions: 7
• ominous thunderstorms: 2
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • William Shatner (duh)
  • George Sawaya (Pa Preston) played “Klingon Soldier #2″ in the classic episode “Errand of Mercy,” and was uncredited as Chief Humboldt in the classic two-parter “The Menagerie”