EDITOR’S NOTE: The Devil’s Rain was on the CBS Late Movie on November 2, 1979, August 13, and October 24, 1980.

The Devil’s Rain! is a movie that could only have been made in 1975. It united old Hollywood royalty, television stars, the visionary director of The Abominable Dr. Phibes and the Church of Satan in the Mexican desert.

It is not a perfect movie. You can’t even say that it has plot holes, as that would require something of a coherent plot — a fact director Robert Fuest was all too aware of. On the sparkling commentary track that accompanies the new Blu-ray release from Severin (picked up from the Dark Sky DVD release), he speaks about discussions with the writers (Gabe Essoe, James Ashton and Gerald Hopman, whose only credit is co-producing Evilspeak, so one assumes that he is Satan) where they assured him that the script made perfect sense. While Fuest claims that he did what he could to clear up his issues with the film, a movie that effectively decimated his promising directorial career emerged.

But you know what? I embrace plot holes the way some critics hold dearly onto their Criterion collection films and back issues of Premiere. There’s no way I can be objective about The Devil’s Rain! The only box it doesn’t check for me is a disclaimer stating that it’s based on a true story.

The film begins with close-ups of Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, along with the wails of the damned as they gnash their teeth in Hell. Then, we’re dropped into the lives of the Preston family, who have suffered under a curse for hundreds of years.

Turns out that at some point in the 18th century, the family screwed over Jonathan Corbis (Ernest Borgnine, Escape from New York), a Satanist who was eventually burned at the stake. He had a book containing the souls of all he had damned, which was stolen by Martin Fyfe (William Shatner, who I don’t need to tell you anything else about). Before he dies, Corbis vows revenge on the Fyfe family, which changes its name to Preston. He’s been stealing them one by one, selling their souls to Satan and trapping them in the devil’s rain. They then become living wax figures with melting eyes and black robes.

That’s how we meet Steve Preston, the leader of the family, who has escaped Corbis to warn his wife  (Ida Lupino, an actress (and director) known for noir classics like The Bigamist and On Dangerous Ground. She often referred to herself as the poor man’s Bette Davis, as she was usually offered the parts that Davis had turned down. She refused those parts so many times that Warner Brothers suspended her, so she used that time to learn the craft of directing on set. As roles for her slowed, she became the second female director admitted to the Director’s Guild, following Dorothy Arzner, the sole woman director of Hollywood’s “Golden Age.”) and son, Mark (also Shatner). As the old man tells them to return the Book of Souls, he melts in the rain.

So what does Mark do? He takes the book directly to Corbis, challenging him to a battle of faith in the desert. That battle quickly turns into Mark trying to escape, but Corbis’ disciples are too much for him. He shows a cross to the priest, who transforms it into a snake before using a ritual to erase Mark’s memory in preparation for a major ceremony.

Oh, the 1970s — when your main character gets wiped out minutes into a movie because he has to leave town for a three-day Star Trek convention in New York. That really happened, and I have no idea if that was why Shatner went from hero to geek in such record time.

Mark’s older brother Tom (Tom Skerritt, Alien) and his wife, Julie, must save the day. Oh yeah — they also have Dr. Sam Richards (Eddie Albert from TV’s Green Acres) along for the ride, as he’s a psychic researcher.

Finding Corbis’ church, Mark watches the ceremony that converts his brother into a wax follower. Anton LaVey shows up under a hood, and Corbis turns into a goat, which is an event that sent me scrambling through our living room in a paroxysm of glee. The Severin release also contains interviews with the Church of Satan’s High Priest Peter H. Gilmore, High Priestess Peggy Nadramia and LaVey’s wife and biographer Blanche Barton, all of whom share anecdotes of the Black Pope’s time on the set (indeed, it seems to be a madcap time by studying the photos they show, with LaVey in a jaunty leather cap smiling like a child on Walpurgisnacht) and input on the film. He’s nearly caught but also discovers that the source of Corbis’ power is the devil’s rain, a glass bottle containing the souls that the priest has captured.

But wait — if he has the devil’s rain, why did he need the book? If he came back to life, why does he need revenge? Look — perhaps these questions will derail your enjoyment of The Devil’s Rain! But not me.

During the final battle — the film moves incredibly fast, making ninety minutes feel like half an hour — the devil’s rain is destroyed by Mark, who finds his lost humanity. Then, it starts to rain.

I love how the advertising for this film states that this is “absolutely the most incredible ending of any motion picture ever!” They aren’t lying. Corbis and his followers melt for nearly ten minutes of special effects, turning into piles of goop. It’s over the top and ridiculous and extraneous and totally awesome. I use This kind of scene to determine if I can be friends with someone. If you dismiss it, you’ll never share a beer with me.

Producer Sandy Howard (who also was responsible for Meteor, Blue Monkey and the A Man Called Horse series) based his whole ad campaign around the end of the film, so he took over the final cut to ensure that this sequence would last and last.

Tom and his wife — whose ESP is the sole reason we can see the flashbacks to know why Corbis is doing what he does — make it out alive, but as he embraces his wife, we see that he’s really hugging Ernest Borgnine! Where’s his wife? Trapped in the devil’s rain, in a scene that comes back at the end of the credits that is harrowing as she looks out into the darkness with no hope.

Is The Devil’s Rain! a good movie? Well, that depends on your perspective. Despite the flimsy plot, Fuest succeeds at delivering plenty of pure weirdness and gorgeous visuals. And there’s so much talent on the screen — I didn’t even mention that this is one of John Travolta’s first films and that Keenan Wynn (Piranha, Laserblast) shows up as the sheriff.

Plus, like all 70’s occult movies, plenty of legends are behind the film. Like Ernest Borgnine claiming that there were so many accidents on set that he’d never work on a Satanic fmovieagain. Or he was saying that the Mafia produced the film and that he was never paid. Cinefantastique magazine even wrote that Fuest had suffered a nervous breakdown during the making of the movie, a fact he disputes on the commentary track. And LaVey claimed that he did a special success ritual for Travolta.

PS – Here’s the link to a June 1975 Argosy interview with LaVey during the filming of The Devil’s Rain! where he discusses buying the panties of “MGM’s most famous stars- from Greer Garson to Liz Taylor – with the labels still on them,” being minimized on movie sets and Ernest Borgnine accepting an honorary priesthood.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Valley of the Dolls was on the CBS Late Movie on October 25, 1974 and May 9 and September 1, 1975.

I love this movie. I can’t deny it. I won’t say that it’s a guilty pleasure. I have no beliefs that this is a great movie or that it’s a classic. I just love it. I quote from it all the time. I wish that I could live in the world of the film.

Jacqueline Susann. It’s thanks to you that I know just how bad dolls are.

Three young women are out to make it in the big bad world.

Neely O’Hara (Patty Duke) has talent, if she can just stay off the pills. She’s in the big bad world of Broadway, where she runs up against arrogant legend Helen Lawson (Susan Hayward).

Jennifer North (Sharon Tate) is gorgeous but doesn’t have the talent. She’s stuck in the chorus.

Anne Welles (Barbara Parkins) is an ingenue who has arrived in New York City to work in the theatrical agency that represents them.

Of course, the dolls — which are the barbiturates Seconal and Nembutal and various stimulants — are all too much for everyone. Neely becomes a diva and cheats on her husband with fashion designer Ted Casablanca, but when she puts her career before him, he leaves her. Eventually, her career goes into the skids because of all the drugs she’s on and she gets committed to a sanitarium.

Jennifer also heads to Hollywood, where she falls for nightclub singer Tony Polar, who has Huntington’s Chorea and ends up in the same asylum as Neely. She also has an abortion and to pay for her man’s care ends up doing French art films, which really means nudie cuties.

Anne falls for a guy named Lyon and she starts a new career as a model, but he gets stolen from her by Neely, fresh out of the sanitarium and ready to get on the make. Of course, she falls right back into the loving embrace of all them dolls. She also gets into a catfight with Helen Lawson and flushes her wig down the toilet, which is a moment that I always pause and get on my hands and knees and thank God that this movie was made.

She then hits rock bottom, has sex with a stranger and watches him rob her. That’s nothing — Jennifer’s mother can’t deal with her softcore films and won’t support her when cancer strikes. She commits suicide with all them dolls.

Anne gets on them too, but she decides to kick the habit and move back to New England. Lyon comes to try and win her back, but she walks away, out of his life for good.

No one leaves Valley of the Dolls unchanged.

Judy Garland was originally cast as Helen Lawson, but was fired when she reportedly came to work all messed up. She would have brought some real know-how of this world to that role. After all, Neely was based on her, as well as a little bit of Betty Hutton and Frances Farmer. She still got paid and loved the sequined pantsuit she was to wear in the movie so much she didn’t just keep it; she had costume designer Travilla make her duplicates.

Patty Duke brought plenty of know-how when it came to drugs, too. She had become addicted to drugs because her guardians gave them to her to make her a better actress.

Of course, this all led to probably my favorite movie of all time, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, which was filmed while the studio was being sued by Jacqueline Susann. Obviously, this Roger Ebert written and Russ Meyer directed film is a completely different and much crazier movie, if that’s possible. Her estate won $2 million in damages years after her death. That’s good, because she believed that even this movie was “a piece of shit.”

A lot of the more risque parts of her book never made it into the film, like Jennifer’s attempting to become a lesbian, Ted Casablanca’s homosexuality and Tony’s love of anal sex. Of course, there are plenty of mentions of the hard g “f word” throughout the film.

There were also two TV series made from this movie. 1981’s Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, had James Coburn, Catherine Hicks, Lisa Hartman, Gary Collins, Bert Convy, one-time wife of Robert Evans Camilla Sparv, Tricia O’Neill from Are You In the House Alone? and Britt Ekland. There was also another 1994 version called Valley of the Dolls which had Carol Lawrence as Bernice Stein (she was also Miriam on the 1981 series), Sally Kirkland, Melissa De Sousa and Sharon Case.

Director Mark Robson, who also was behind the movies Peyton Place and Earthquake — as well as an assistant editor on Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons and an editor on Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie — was rough as hell on the actresses in this movie. Sharon Tate was the one he directed most of his rage at, but even years after his death, Patty Duke would refer to him as “a mean son of a bitch.”

Famous science fiction writer, noted crank and one of my heroes, Harlan Ellison was the original screenwriter of this film. He was upset at the softened ending of the film and demanded that his name be taken off of it. Hollywood never really treated Harlan all that fairly, between stealing two of his Outer Limits episodes for Terminator and him getting fired from Disney within a few hours thanks to an impression of Mickey, Minnie and Donald having barnyard coitus.

I saw the first trailer for this movie and purposefully avoided any other reviews or spoilers, which was difficult, as this seems to be all that Film Twitter is talking about. The idea of the trailer — someone is turning children into people who their parents can’t recognize and need to kill — was intriguing.

So if you want to go into this like I did, spoiler free, stop reading now. I won’t be mad.

FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is able to find a suspect’s home without any other evidence. This leads to her being tested for psychic abilities and she’s able to divine the truth about half the time, which come to think of it, is a batting average that would get you into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Her superior officer,  Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) assigns her to his most puzzling case. A series of murder suicides have been happening for more than a decade. In each case, the father kills the wife and children and then kills himself. Family annihilators aren’t new. What is is that each crime scene has a letter in code from someone named Longlegs. This handwriting doesn’t match any victim yet there is no evidence that another person was ever in the home.

Each father also had a nine-year-old daughter born on the fourteenth of the month. The murders happened within six days before or after the birthday and form a sigil when laid out on a calendar with only one date missing to finish this occult shape.

The only survivor of Longlegs is Carrie Anne Camera (Kiernan Shipka) and she’s been in a mental home, silent for years. She recognizes Harker and gives her a clue to find her doll, which was an exact duplicate of her at nine along with a metal brain inside that the coroner claims had the voice of his ex-wife.

At this point, the FBI should realize that the killer — who has been sending letters to Harker and even broken into her home once, giving her the clues she needs to decode his language — knows too much about Harker, who already seems brittle and unable to deal with the case. They keep her on, even when they learn that her mother called the police about a man matching the look of Longlegs years ago and that Harker has a Polaroid of the man, which they use to soon arrest him.

Alright: I have to break from the narrative for a second and ask some questions.

Code and cyphers are cool. See Zodiac. See Se7en. See the real life Zodiac Killer.

However, the coded language in this movie is never really referred to again after Harker learns how to decode it. It never breaks anything in the case. It’s just cool.

Polaroids are cool, too. After years of pro wrestlers and strippers being the only ones to use them, they suddenly show up in a plenty of art and movies.

One Polaroid image of a man’s face is in no way enough evidence to find someone — they literally find Longlegs in seconds — much less enough physical evidence to keep him as long as they do.

And anyways, you should probably know that Longlegs is Nicholas Cage and his performance is wonderful but breaks the movie because other than the cinematography, nothing in it is as good as his over the top Tiny Tim in Blood Harvest acting. Then you wonder, why is the killer into T. Rex? Why does he make these dolls, which trust me, is the longest con ever. You have to get a creepy life-sized doll of a girl that looks exactly like her into the home and then have them play with it and then hope that she has a father, as well as being born on the ninth. It’s almost too much work until you get to the reveal.

Ah, the reveal.

Despite being a police procedural up until now, Longlegs has lived in Harker’s mother’s (Alicia Witt) basement and that he’s made her the accomplice, a nun who has never been mentioned in any of the police reports until the third act just lets you know that they make these metal-brained evil American Girl dolls with Satanic magic energy. I have to quote my friend Kris, who said, “Imagine if you watched all of Silence of the Lambs and you learn that Clarice’s mom used to bang it out with Hannibal Lecter.”

All of the metal brains seems Showtime Twin Peaks except that I expect that kind of thing from David Lynch and Twin Peaks is the epitome of horror police procedural and when it makes no sense at all, you demand that from it.

Now imagine investing time into a story and then you get a rug pull like this.

Anyways, in case you didn’t guess when you saw that Harker’s boss has a nine-year-old, you can see where this all ends up. You might think that one of the highest rated FBI agents in the country who has been working on a case for years about a man that kills girls age nine on the fourteenth of the month might have the deductive reasoning skills to figure that perhaps inviting an agent connected to his case is a bad idea, not to mention that maybe — just maybe — he and his family would be targeted.

Whoever did Neon’s marketing for this movie, creating the thebirthdaymurders.net website, the trailers, the 458-666-HELL phone number, the posters, it’s all great. Director Oz Perkins told IndieWire that NEON “really responded strongly to the movie, the raw materials of the movie really excited them, the way it looks, the way it feels, the way it sounds. They asked me early on, ‘Do we have your permission to kind of go nuts?’ And I said, ‘What else are we doing here? Go for it. Do your thing.””

The movie that they’re selling you is artifice. The outside of it looks so pretty, with long shots and takes that go on like a movie from another era, but then you’re reminded that it’s 2024 and most modern horror never sticks the landing. It’s not bad but isn’t it worse to believe that something could be great and it’s just average instead of figuring it’s average and not being disappointed?

For a movie that has been called the Silence of the Lambs for the 2020s, this has none of the actual story that backed up that film. The plot unravels as the holes become apparent with just a moment’s thought. As for the comparisons to Fincher, his iron grip of control and must be perfect realism wouldn’t have the 2007 version of The Price Is Right song play in a movie set in the 90s. Then again, Oregon rarely has lightning and thunder and that looks cool, so it’s in the movie.

I saw this at an Alamo Drafthouse and got trailers for Happy Birthday to Me and Brotherhood of Satan which put me in the headspace that I just might get a movie that I would like. But I’m just left with questions in this one and not the good kind of questions that intrigued me and wish I spent more time in the world of the film. I want things to be better and yes, yet again, I got caught up in the hype. You’d think I’d finally learn by now.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Armed and Dangerous was on the CBS Late Movie on October 27, 1989.

Mark Lester can do a buddy cop movie. But a comedy? A movie that starts with John Candy’s character sent up the river and Eugene Levy as the worst lawyer ever throwing himself on the mercy of a judge — Stacy Keach Sr.! — to keep the mob from killing him, with Candy in a Bill Murray role instead of the likable everyman?

If anyone can handle it, it’s Lester.

With no job prospects, Dooley and Kane (Candy and Levy) apply for work at Guard Dog Security, run by Captain Clarence O’Connell (Kenneth McMillan, Cat’s Eye) and supervised by Maggie Cavanaugh (an impish and delightful Meg Ryan).

Their first night on the job, some goons take advantage of them when lead guard Bruno makes our heroes take a break. He’s Tiny Lister, better known as Zeus from No Holds Barred and Deebo in the Friday movies.

This launches them on a quest to see who has set them up — again in Candy’s case — you get plenty of great casting to help the story move, a hallmark of Lester’s work. There’s Robert Loggia as corrupt union head Michael Carlino, Brion James and Johnathan Banks (both strangely with full heads of hair) as his goons, James Tolkan (Strickland from Back to the Future), Don Stroud (Stunts), Steve Railsback (Turkey Shoot) pretty much playing the same character as he did as Manson in Helter Skelter, Tony Burton (Duke from Rocky), Teagan Clive (yes, Bimbo Cop from Vice Academy 2 and The Alienator), Tito Puente, Judy Landers (Dr. Alien!), Christine Dupree (who was one of the models for the aborted video game Tattoo Assassins) and even a blink and you’ll miss him appearance by David Hess as a gunman.

You may watch this and say, “Robert Loggia has a nice, if familiar house.” That’s because Jed Clampett used to live there. The Sport Pit, the gym that gets messed up in the film, is also in the same strip mall that D-Fens shot up the phone booth in Falling Down.

By all accounts, this movie sounded like a mess to make. Originally written by Harold Ramis as a vehicle for Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, it was resurrected by producer Brian Grazer.

Candy and Tom Hanks were cast, but Hanks dropped out, and Candy recommended Eugene Levy. Of all people, John Carpenter was initially attached to direct.

Ramis disliked the final film, saying: “It was not good. I tried to take my name off it. I took my name off in one place.” That said, he’s credited as a screenwriter, despite his demands.

As for Grazer, Lester demanded that John Candy call Meg Ryan a bitch in a scene. Candy refused, Lester walks and Grazer had to finish directing for the day. Keep in mind, this is an alleged story.

It’s an alright movie that moves fast enough. It doesn’t feel like Lester’s other films, but that may be because of studio pressures. I had difficulty locating a copy and the one I did find had Russian actors speaking over the English soundtrack, even reading out loud the credits. I think it made this a much better film.