The stories of everyone involved in the making of The Devil's Rain are a lot more interesting than the film itself, but I have a perverse admiration for this goofy little Satanic cult movie. Sure, it's semi-coherent at best and lacking a strong central character and the concluding scene is somehow thirteen hours long even though the total running time is one hour and twenty-six minutes, but I find most of it compelling in a warm childhood blanket sort of way.
Bryanston Distributing Company bankrolled, produced, and distributed The Devil's Rain. Bryanston was a money-laundering front for New York City's Colombo crime family, and their first crack at the moviemaking game, the surprise crossover porn hit Deep Throat, made them a bundle but also got them embroiled in several obscenity cases. Bryanston also purchased the distribution rights to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, leading to the majority of the people who worked on that movie receiving zero payment for their efforts until New Line Cinema acquired the rights in the early '80s. Bryanston's other films include another porn flick, The Party at Kitty and Stud's (featuring a pre-fame Sylvester Stallone in a non-explicit role), Paul Morrissey's Flesh for Frankenstein, John Carpenter's Dark Star, and the Earth, Wind & Fire movie That's the Way of the World.
Bryanston may have been run by gangsters, but those gangsters ensured that The Devil's Rain had room in the budget for a pretty solid cast, a lineup that Joe Bob Briggs has accurately called "a Satanic cult version of a Love Boat episode." We have Ernest Borgnine, Ida Lupino, Eddie Albert, William Shatner, Keenan Wynn, Tom Skerritt, Bunuel regular Claudio Brook, Church of Satan founder Anton Szandor LaVey, and a pre-fame John Travolta in a glorified extra part. Travolta appears briefly in two scenes and has a single line of dialogue, and his eyes and hair are never visible (he's wearing a hooded robe, and I'll get into the eye business later), but his name is prominently displayed in the opening and closing credits because Welcome Back, Kotter had become a hit shortly before the film's release.
Speaking of Travolta and Shatner and eye business, The Devil's Rain is responsible for a couple of major historical pop culture happenings. Depressed at the state of his career and looking for guidance, Travolta was introduced to Scientology by Joan Prather, who plays Tom Skerritt's ESP-gifted wife (more on that ESP business later). Yes, there is a straight line from The Devil's Rain to Battlefield Earth. On to Shatner. Several of the Satan-worshiping cult members in the movie have no eyeballs for some reason, so the actors are wearing masks of their own faces in these scenes, created by Don Post Studios. Spoiler alert: Shatner gets his eyeballs yoinked, so a Shatner mask was created. Don Post Studios used its Devil's Rain Shatner mold as the basis for a mass-produced line of Shatner Halloween masks, which were branded as Star Trek masks. A production designer on John Carpenter's Halloween bought three of these masks and spray-painted them white for use as the now-iconic Michael Myers mask. (Try to find the picture of three of the Halloween cast members wearing the three masks while playing acoustic guitars and singing at the wrap party. It's solid gold.)
Directing this impressive Hollywood cast in the remote desert a few hundred miles from Durango, Mexico, with New York mob money is legendary British production designer Robert Fuest, who also directed the incredible, highly recommended The Abominable Dr. Phibes and its well-regarded sequel Dr. Phibes Rises Again (I still need to catch up with that one). Fuest had a bad time on The Devil's Rain and didn't get to assert much creative independence. He kept asking the producers if he could make changes to the screenplay and they kept telling him no, he had no input on the edit (he agrees with almost everyone that the closing scene is hilariously overlong), and he's not particularly proud of the finished results. Despite these frustrations, Fuest makes it all look pretty good. He has a nice eye, even when forced to tamp down his full power.
The Devil's Rain begins in a ranch house in the middle of an exceedingly powerful rain storm (though not the titular devil's rain). A worried Mrs. Preston (Ida Lupino) anxiously waits with family friend John (Woodrow Chambliss) for her son and husband. Her husband has gone missing in the flooding and destruction of the storm, and her son Mark (William Shatner) is looking for him. Mark finally returns without his dad. There is much talk about a special hidden book and somebody named Corbis and how Corbis should never get his hands on the book. When Papa Preston finally returns, he has no eyeballs and his flesh is waxy and melting. He tells them that Corbis has found them and to keep the book safe. Then he promptly dies and melts away. Mrs. Preston thinks the eyeball-less patriarch is not really her husband. Mark gets his gun and says he's going to the desert to confront Corbis. Mrs. Preston gives Mark an amulet to wear from the same secret compartment in the floor containing the book. A pickup truck pulls into the yard. Mark goes out to greet the truck but sees only a tiny figure strapped to the steering wheel. All hell breaks loose inside. He goes in to investigate and sees a bloodied, battered John hanging upside down. His mother is missing. He frees John, who mentions a group of people with no faces. Mark yells "Cooooorbiiiiiiiss!" in full Shatner mode. We still don't know who the hell Corbis is or why the book is so damn important. What an opening scene.
The next day, after some intense chit-chat with Sheriff Owens (Keenan Wynn), Mark heads to a ghost town in the desert. The movie briefly turns into a western as a cowboy-hat-wearing Mark tries to get some water from a pump and an older cowboy comes out of a church to talk him up, western-style, amid the visually stunning Mexican desert. This older cowboy is the much-hyped Corbis (Ernest Borgnine), an emissary of Satan. He wants the damn book. Mark wants his damn parents. A faith-off throwdown is proposed, Satanism vs. Christianity in Corbis's church for all the marbles, on Netflix, sponsored by Snickers and Hulk Hogan's Real American Beer.
Does what follows make much sense? Not really. Is it boring? Sometimes. Does it look cool? Absolutely. Does Borgnine get to go hog wild? Hell yeah, brother. Do faces melt? Do they ever. Do we get to see the devil's rain? It's in the title, my man. Of course we get to see the devil's rain. Despite the Phish bootleg-length closing scene that keeps on noodlin' instead of chooglin' for an absurd length of time, I had a pretty good time with this movie. It's not that great, but it's so 1975 it hurts, and I have a major soft spot for it.
