The Devils is nutty movie with lots of naked nuns and torture in it. It features a popular, horny priest who gets in the way of powerful people and hunchbacked, horny nun who's obsessed with him.
I liked this movie at first. It's very over the top but in a fun way, and Vanessa Redgrave is terrific as the disturbed nun. But as it got both more horrific and more confused I found myself losing interest.
The movie seems in conflict with itself. Oliver Reed's part gets continually more serious, like something from Lion in Winter of Man for all Seasons, while the rest of the movie becomes a weird mix of disturbing horror and burlesque comedy. The torture scenes are directed like something from a Richard Lester comedy yet are also disturbing.
At a certain point the movie seemed to explode into randomness. There's a scene where all the nuns go crazy and get naked, but why? I know there were some cuts that Russell said made the film more confusing, so perhaps this wasn't so abrupt and out-of-nowhere originally, but I can only go by what I see and what I saw made zero sense. From that point on everything seemed increasingly random.
By the end the horror and tragedy are the focus, but I didn't feel the movie earned its sense of tragedy.
My feeling is, you can make Holy Grail or you can make Man for All Seasons but you can't make both at the same time, which seems to have been Russell's goal. If I could go back in time I would skip this one.
I liked this movie at first. It's very over the top but in a fun way, and Vanessa Redgrave is terrific as the disturbed nun. But as it got both more horrific and more confused I found myself losing interest.
The movie seems in conflict with itself. Oliver Reed's part gets continually more serious, like something from Lion in Winter of Man for all Seasons, while the rest of the movie becomes a weird mix of disturbing horror and burlesque comedy. The torture scenes are directed like something from a Richard Lester comedy yet are also disturbing.
At a certain point the movie seemed to explode into randomness. There's a scene where all the nuns go crazy and get naked, but why? I know there were some cuts that Russell said made the film more confusing, so perhaps this wasn't so abrupt and out-of-nowhere originally, but I can only go by what I see and what I saw made zero sense. From that point on everything seemed increasingly random.
By the end the horror and tragedy are the focus, but I didn't feel the movie earned its sense of tragedy.
My feeling is, you can make Holy Grail or you can make Man for All Seasons but you can't make both at the same time, which seems to have been Russell's goal. If I could go back in time I would skip this one.