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The Devil's Rain
The Devil's Rain
	Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Robert Fuest
Written by	Gabe Essoe; James Ashton; Gerald Hopman;
Produced by	Louis Peraino; Michael S. Glick;
Starring	Ernest Borgnine; Eddie Albert; William Shatner; Keenan Wynn; Tom Skerritt; Joan Prather; Ida Lupino; Anton LaVey;
Cinematography	Alex Phillips Jr. [es]
Edited by	Michael Kahn
Music by	Al De Lory
Production; company	Sandy Howard Productions
Distributed by	Bryanston Distributing Company
Release dates	20 June 1975 (United States); 7 August 1975 (New York City);
Running time	85 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Box office	$1.8 million

The Devil's Rain is a 1975 American supernatural horror film directed by Robert Fuest and starring Ernest Borgnine, Eddie Albert, William Shatner, Tom Skerritt, Ida Lupino and Keenan Wynn, along with John Travolta in his film debut. Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey is credited as the film's technical advisor and appeared in the film playing a minor role, as does his partner Diane Hegarty.^[3]

The film was released by Bryanston Distributing Company on August 7, 1975 to negative reviews. In the years since its release, it has developed a cult following.^[4] Critic Michael Adams called it "the ultimate cult movie ... It's about a cult, has a cult following, was devised with input from a cult leader, and saw a future superstar indoctrinated into a cult he'd help popularize."^[4]

Plot

A curse affects the Preston family, caused by their betrayal of the Satanic priest Jonathan Corbis in colonial New England. Corbis has harassed the Preston family for generations to obtain a book containing the signatures of the members of his cult which bind their souls to Satan. Corbis captures patriarch Steve Preston, who is allowed to escape to warn his wife Emma and son Mark. He tells them to give the book to Corbis, before melting into a waxy substance. Mark advises Emma to keep the book hidden and entrusts her to family friend John. However, moments after he leaves to meet Corbis, he hears Emma scream and returns to find the Satanists have abducted Emma, leaving John bound, hanging by his feet and terrified.

In a ghost town in the desert, Mark challenges Corbis to a battle of faith. Corbis leads Mark to his cult's church where he reveals that Emma has joined them, as reflected by her now eyeless face. When Mark refuses to do the same, he is surrounded and overwhelmed by Corbis's followers.

Sheriff Owens scoffs at John's story of eyeless cultists living in a long-deserted town and refuses to conduct a search for the three missing Prestons, so Mark's older brother, Tom, and his wife Julie search for them on their own. In the ghost town they are attacked by Satanists. After escaping, Tom sends Julie to summon the authorities while he returns to rescue Mark. En route, Julie is captured by a Satanist who was waiting in her car.

Wearing the robe of a defeated Satanist, Tom infiltrates Corbis's church, where Corbis performs a ceremony to convert Mark into one of his eyeless minions. Tom is discovered by the Satanists, but eludes capture. He and Dr. Sam Richards, a psychic researcher, review the book, which explains that the source of Corbis's power is an ornate glass bottle known as "The Devil's Rain", which contains the souls of Corbis's disciples. They also find Mark's signature in the book, which Richards is sure was not there the last time Mark had the book.

Tom and Richards head to Corbis's church and remove The Devil's Rain from its hiding place. The Satanists converge on the church, so Tom and Richards retreat, taking The Devil's Rain but leaving behind the book, which is taken by Corbis. As Corbis begins the ceremony to convert Julie to an eyeless one, Tom jumps in to intervene, and is captured as well. Richards threatens to destroy The Devil's Rain, but is overpowered by the Satanists, and Mark takes the Devil's Rain from him. Richards tells Mark that he can still save his soul by destroying the bottle, while Corbis maintains that if the bottle is destroyed Mark will wander through nothingness for eternity, unable to enter either Heaven or Hell. Mark smashes the bottle. The Devil's Rain is released from the bottle, melting the Satanists (including Mark and Corbis) and burning down the church. Tom and Julie make a hasty exit. As Tom embraces Julie, it is revealed that he is actually embracing Corbis, and that his wife's soul has become trapped within a new Devil's Rain.

Cast

Ernest Borgnine as Jonathan Corbis
Eddie Albert as Dr. Sam Richards
William Shatner as Mark Preston / Martin Fyffe
Ida Lupino as Emma Preston
Tom Skerritt as Tom Preston
Joan Prather as Julie Preston
Keenan Wynn as Sheriff Owens
John Travolta as Danny, a cult member
Claudio Brook as Preacher Blythe, the witchhunter who condemns the Prestons' ancestors.
George Sawaya as Steve Preston
Anton LaVey as High Priest
Diane Hegarty as Priscilla Corbis
Woodrow Chambliss as John
Erika Carlsson as Aaronessa Fyffe
Lisa Todd as Lilith

Production

Casting

Vincent Price, star of Robert Fuest’s Dr. Phibes films, was the first choice to play Jonathan Corbis. Peter Cushing and Joseph Cotton, also of the Phibes films, were offered the part of Dr. Richards. Christopher Plummer was offered the part of Mark Preston before William Shatner was cast. Aside from Shatner, another Star Trek associate worked on the film, special makeup effects artist Ellis “Sonny” Burman Jr.^[5] He would win a Primetime Emmy Award for his work on Star Trek: Voyager in 1996.

John Travolta made his film debut, playing a supporting part as one of the cultists.^[3] His voice is dubbed in the final film. During filming, he converted to the Scientology religion after co-star Joan Prather gave him a copy of the book Dianetics written by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.^[6]^[7]^[8]^[9]

Filming

The screenplay was originally set in New England, but for budgetary reasons shooting took place shot entirely on-location in Durango, Mexico and at Estudios Churubusco.^[1]

Ernest Borgnine later claimed the film was financed using Mafia money, and that he had never been paid for his work. The distributor, Bryanston Distributing Company, was known to be a money laundering front of the Colombo crime family. The president, Louis Peraino, was a producer under the pseudonym "James V. Cullen."

According to Robert Fuest, financing problems caused the shoot to be cut by several weeks. As a result, multiple key scenes were never shot, resulting in a disjointed and ambiguous plot. He denied claims that he suffered a nervous breakdown during shooting.

Special effects

The “melting” effects in the film’s climax, created by Ellis Burman Jr. and Thomas R. Burman,^[5] were achieved with wax life casts and inflatable sex dolls. For scenes were live actors were needed, Burman pumped a mixture of colored methyl cellulose, air, and smoke through flat-ironed tubes running under the actors' prosthetic makeup.^[5] The producers thought Fuest's initial director's cut ran too short, and insisted on adding more melting footage.^[5] Fuest referred to the sequence as "a terribly prologued wake…it goes on and on and on…it’s ridiculous."^[5]

Ernest Borgnine's goat-demon makeup took four hours to apply.^[5]

Multiple sources claim the life cast taken of William Shatner to create the “eyeless” facial prosthetics were used by Don Post to make the Captain Kirk mask that would later be modified to create Michael Myers mask in Halloween (1978).^[10]^[11] However, Shatner disputes this, claiming the Post mask was based on a cast taken during the production of Star Trek: The Original Series.^[12]

Release

The Devil's Rain was released in 1975, with screenings in New York on August 7 and Los Angeles on August 13, 1975.^[1]

In 2017, Severin Films released the film on Blu-ray, featuring a 2K restoration from the film's original interpositive as well as various special features.^[13]

Reception

The Devil's Rain received a uniformly negative critical response, with the chief complaint being the incoherent storyline. The film's lack of adequate scares was also widely criticized.

Vincent Canby in The New York Times opined that "The Devil's Rain is ostensibly a horror film, but it barely manages to be a horror ... It is as horrible as watching an egg fry."^[14]

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times said "All of this would be good silly fun if the movie weren't so painfully dull. The problem is that the material's stretched too thin. There's not enough here to fill a feature-length film." He particularly derided the exhaustive melting of the Satanists at the finale. He gave the film 1½ stars out of four, and eventually added it to his "Most Hated" movies list.^[15]

Robert Fuest believed the film's failure had a detrimental effect on his career. He only directed one more feature film, the erotic drama Aphrodite (1982), and spent the remainder of his career in television.

In his 2010 book Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies, Australian film reviewer Michael Adams called The Devil's Rain "the ultimate cult movie ... It's about a cult, has a cult following, was devised with input from a cult leader, and saw a future superstar indoctrinated into a cult he'd help popularize."^[4] The last reference is to John Travolta, who made his film debut in Devil's Rain, and Scientology, to which Travolta was introduced by a crew member during filming.

Screen Slate described the film as "the exemplar of a certain kind of 1970s American horror movie: slow, weird, 'plotless,' and depressing.... But what could more accurately depict the hollowed-out core of the post-Nixon American soul than nothingness, ennui, and a deal with the devil?"^[10]