All you need to know about 1975's The Devil's Rain, out today on DVD, is that it has Ernie Borgnine, Bill Shatner, Ida Lupino and Keenan Wynn, which means you've got some heavy-duty overacting, and it has a climax during which lots of people melt. That's giving away the ending, but back when this opened, that was the whole selling point: MELTING PEOPLE!! AAIIEE!! (This was before Raiders Of the Lost Ark definitively prooved that melting Nazis are cooler than melting Satanists, a fact which seems self-evident.)
The chief interest in seeing The Devil's Rain today is as a pleasant reminder of the anything-goes state of the horror film back in the seventies. Then as now, the primary audience for horror tended to be young, but back then, the films didn't pander to them. Yeah, there were dead teenager movies back then (like Black Christmas and of course Halloween), but there were also serious big-budget items like The Exorcist, the twisted mindfucks of David Cronenberg, enjoyable PG-rated schlock like Grizzly, regional oddities like The Legend Of Boggy Creek, and...well, whatever target audience wanted to see a melting Ernie Borgnine, they were served as well.
I've said it before, I'll no doubt say it again, but horror movies were one of my first passions, and the current state of the art is depressing to me. A case could be made that Hostel and the Saw series offer mirrors of our bleak, hopeless national spirit, but when I see big-budget, entirely soulless remakes of seventies indie classics like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the upcoming "reimagining" of Brian DePalma's Sisters, I just don't see the point. The originals had a true outsider quality. The remakes are about as scary as weekend warriors gathering in Sturgis and pretending they're outlaws.
But at least we have the DVDs. Even if you weren't there, The Devil's Rain has the ability to take you back to the mid-seventies, and nothing is scarier than that.
