The Devils (1971)

This short review condemning The Devils and lamenting that its controversial content was not presented with the same care as another infamous 1970s film was written after watching the movie on Halloween of my senior year of college. My overall rating for the film was Worthless, which is depicted as a dollar sign with an 'X' through it.

As with another personal favorite of celebrated film critic Mark Kermode, Brazil (1985), The Devils is a movie that squanders the brilliant acting performance of its lead actor Oliver Reed. The movie is a spectacle, but a dreadful bore as well. There is no greater shame to controversy than creating a cinematic work that’s content is so disturbing, disgusting, and vile that it enrages the censors, but fails to engage the audience’s lust for the taboo. The Devils is grandiose and over the top, but its scenes are so sensational that it’s simply impossible for the audience to connect to what they are watching. Had The Devils been approached in the same manner that a film released four years after it was, then it may have been a gripping, terrifying account of demented and perverted religion run amuck.

This later release I reference is Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), an equal parts bleak and sensationalized film that tells a story of corrupt fascists abducting teenagers with the intention of subjecting them to four months of psychological, sexual, and physical torture to see if any of these youths meet their deranged notions of purity. Against all rational thought, Salò manages to be both believable and plausible due to its balanced presentation. The Devils is based on a true story, but Ken Russell takes it and turns it into a film of immense scale, immense proportion, and zero perceived reality. Salò is secluded, immense in proportion to the victims but no further, and brings haunting realism to a fictional tale first envisioned by the Marquise de Sade and then transposed by the Italian filmmaking master Pier Paolo Pasolini to Mussolini’s Republic of Salò. Had The Devils been directed by the late, great Pasolini, then Salò would have some competition for the most well-made and overtly controversial film of the 1970s, if not the history of cinema. And if this had been the case, the two films could have become wondrous companion pieces.