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: Mitchell was on the CBS Late Movie on October 1, 1980.

Mitchell reveals a lot of misconceptions.

First: Joe Don Baker was once presented as the kind of sex symbol who didn’t just get Linda Evans in bed, he was kind of angry about it.

Second: Mitchell was not intended to be riffed on. And yet here we are, with a movie that most people know from the final episode that Joel was on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Then again, critics hated this when it came out in 1975. Vincent Carnaby said, “Mitchell, starring Joe Don Baker as a hard-nosed Los Angeles detective named Mitchell, has a lot of over-explicit violence, some gratuitous sex stuff and some rough language, yet it looks like a movie that couldn’t wait to get to prime-time television. Perhaps it’s a pilot film for a TV series, or maybe it’s just a movie that’s bad in a style we associate with some of the more mindless small-screen entertainments.

Mitchell spends what seems to be the greater part of the film climbing in and out of automobiles, driving automobiles, chasing other automobiles, parking automobiles, and leaning against the body of automobiles that are temporarily at rest. Once he smashes a hoodlum’s hand in the door of an automobile.

The climax, for a giddy change of pace, features a police helicopter in pursuit of a high-speed cabin cruiser. Automobiles sink when driven onto water.”

He could have been right. After all, the cut that aired on the CBS Late Movie was heavily edited with scenes shot just for TV, eliminating most of the violence, nudity and profanity. It also has the death of John Saxon’s character happen off screen, where we hear about his death on the radio. Keep in mind that he’s presented as Mitchell’s arch enemy.

Mitchell (Baker) is after Saxon’s character, Walter Deaney, but learns from the Chief of Police (Robert Phillips) tells Deaney is wanted for “every federal law violation in the book” and  “FBI property.” This doesn’t stop Mitchell, who wants to go after him instead of staking out James Arthur Cummins (Martin Balsam), a crime boss shipping in heroin. To get him off the case, Deaney hired $1,000 a night call girl Greta (Linda Evans) to keep him busy. Instead, Mitchell arrests her for possession and even turns down a bribe. Soon, Deaney and Cummins are working together to kill our slovenly hero.

If you enjoy larger men battling, this has Baker fighting Merlin Olsen. I mean, we’ve already imagined a world where a high priced sex worker wants to sleep with Baker for free. Why not?

Directed by Andrew V. McLaglen (The Wild Geese, The Sea Wolves, Sahara) and written by Ian Kennedy Martin, this also has a great theme song, “Mitchell” by Hoyt Axton.

“My my my my Mitchell
What do your Mama say?
What would she do
if she knew you
were fallin’ round and carryin’ on that way…
Crackin’ some heads, jumpin’ in and out of beds
and hangin’ round the criminal scene…
Do you think you are some kind of a star like the guys on the movie screen…

Well oh my my my Mitchell
What would your captain say?
If he knew you was hangin’ round
Eatin’ with the crooks and shootin’ up the town
Know you been out there, roundin’ up the syndicate
succeedin’ where the others have failed
Oh my my my Mitchell
You shoot ’em just to get ’em in jail
When they take a look in the record book, they’ll find you got a lot of class…

The whole shebang, arrestin’ painted ladies for a little grass
Oh my my my Mitchell!”

Supposedly, Baker was so upset by this being on Mystery Science Theater 3000 that he threatened to fight anyone from the show if he saw them. That didn’t stop them from also doing another of his movies, Final Justice — another movie in which he uses an orange to prove how he is going to destroy someone — on the show.

You can watch this without riffing on Tubi. They also have the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Ultimate Warrior was on the CBS Late Movie on July 2 and November 24, 1982 and February 6 and July 15, 1986.

There had been post-apocalyptic movies before — End of the World came out in 1916 — and the genre was already a big deal by 1975, following The Omega Man and Soylent Green. So when most people believe that end of the world movies started in 1979 with Mad Max, they’d been around long before.

The Ultimate Warrior is pretty much a western — all good post-apocalyptic movies are — with a frontier town under attack. That town would be a small fort in what’s left of New York City, a place led by Baron (Max Von Sydow). One of his followers is a former scientist named Cal (Richard Kelton), who has developed plague resistant seeds that grow in the dead soil, creating a desert in the wasteland.

And, just like every western — and again, post-apocalyptic movie — there are gangs of bad people making the lives of good people hard. One of those gangs is led by Carrot (William Smith!) and Baron is so worried about them that he hires on a loner gunslinger — or fighter — named Carson (Yul Brynner).

Even with his abilities, the settlement is still doomed. So Baron sends his pregnant daughter Melinda (Joanna Miles) away from the citty with the goal of building a new world on a North Carolina island. But escaping the city isn’t easy and it costs nearly everyone their lives and Carson his hand, but the ultimate warrior is nothing if not resilient. Or deadly.

Director and writer Robert Clouse knew how to make a movie with fights as the main draw, as he directed Enter the Dragon and Game of Death with Bruce Lee, as well as Black Belt Jones with Jim Kelly, Golden Needles, Force: Five, The Big Brawl with Jackie Chan, Gymkata with Kurt Thomas, two China O’Brien movies with Cynthia Rothrock and Ironheart with Bolo Yeung. He also made the animal attack movies The Pack and the rats on the loose film Deadly Eyes.

And yes, this movie is where the wrestler got his name from.

After The Seven Minutes and Blacksnake were failures at the box office, Russ Meyer went back to what worked best. Sex comedies.

He said, “I’m back to big bosoms, square jaws, lotsa action and the most sensational sex you ever saw. I’m back to what I do best – erotic, comedic sex, sex, sex – and I’ll never stray again.”

He wrote this himself and claimed it was based on Horatio Alger’s tales. “They were always about a young man who was totally good, and he would always set out to gain his fortune and he would always come up against terrible people. They did everything they could to do him in, but he fought fair, you know, and he always survived and succeeded in the end. So, that’s just one facet of the thing.”

Supervixens would be the biggest commercial success Meyer had since Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, making $8.2 million on a $100,000 budget.

Clint Ramsey (Charles Pitts) works at a gas station for Martin Bormann (Henry Rowland) — Hitler’s personal secretary who ran to America and runs his small shop in the desert — and is married to SuperAngel (Shari Eubank). All she does all day is call and harass him at work when she isn’t demanding that he come back home and make love to her. When a customer — SuperLorna (Christy Hartburg) — flirts with him, she flips out and tries to kill him with an axe. He goes to a bar where Super Haji (Haji) comes on to him as a a cop named Harry Sledge (Charles Napier, playing the same character from Harry, Cherry and Raquel) tries to sleep with his wife but can’t perform, so he murders her in the bathtub. He burns down their house and sets up Clint, who runs from the law.

The rest of the movie is a series of his adventures, from being molested and mugged by Cal (John LaZar) and Super Cherry (Colleen Brennan), taken care of by a farmer whose wife SuperSoul (Uschi Digard) assaults him, sleeping with the deaf daughter of a motel owner named SuperEula (Deborah McGuire) and finally, discovering his true love, Super Angel (also Eubank). Of course, Harry shows up and wants to destroy their happiness, even if Clint only sees him as a friend. They’re both nearly blown up before the dynamite claims the villain like Wile E. Coyote.

Meyer said that the where Harry beats, stabs, stomps and drops a radio in the tub to kill Super Vixen was the most trouble he’d had with censors, other than Kitten Natividad’s full nudity in Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. He also had to deal with watching this movie in the theater with Eubank and her father, who hated that his daughter was working with Russ Meyer. After the film ended, Eubank’s father sad he actually liked the film.

The one thing that’s interesting about this movie is that it’s unafraid to show glimpses of penis unlike so many other sex films. It’s also absolutely ridiculous and so over the top that I have no idea who can take it seriously, other than people still being upset about the murder scene. At least Super Vixen comes back as a ghost and is able to be in charge of her own sexuality, as all ends happily because of love.

Don Edmonds and produced by David F. Friedman, Ilsa is one of the most notorious exploitation movies of all time. Gene Siskel said it was “the most degenerate picture I have seen to play downtown” and people were shocked by its depictions of castration, torture, human experiments and sexual degradation. Of course, it was a huge success.

Based on Ilse Koch, a woman who ran the Buchenwald concentration camp, where she supposedly killed some prisoners to get their tattooed skin. Even if time — and court cases — have proved that she was not as horrible as those claims, the legend stuck.

She did not, however, look anything like Dyanne Thorne. The actress went from the stage and comedy albums in New York City to singing in Las Vegas and acting in movies like Point of Terror. She was also a church ordained, non-denominational ministers of a church called the Science of Mind. Later in life — she also studied anthropology — Thorne and husband Howard Mauer offered weddings in Las Vegas. She would even dress like Ilsa if you wanted.

Ilsa runs a prison camp and also uses it for her sexual needs, which can’t be satisfied by any man. When any of them orgasm before her, they lose their manhood and are killed. The only man that survives her bedroom is Wolfe (Gregory Knoph), who looks like the perfect Aryan Ubermensch. He will be, however, her undoing.

Meanwhile, a visiting German general gives Ilsa the Iron Cross for her service as she proves that women are superior when it comes to dealing with pain. He also asks her to urinate on him, so…yeah. You may not be ready for this movie, to be perfectly honest.

The other reason this movie works is a great cast. There’s George Buck Flower as Dr. Binz, Ilsa’s assistant doctor. He was also an uncredited assistant director, casting director, set decorator and grip. It also has appearances by Uschi Digard, Colleen Brennan (AKA Sharon Kelly; she’s also in the first sequel) and Sandy Dempsey.

Ilsa comes after Lee Frost and Friedman’s Love Camp 7 became a success in Canada, which found André Link and John Dunning of Cinepix Film Properties wanting to make their own cash-in. There were some worries that this movie would backfire, so it starts with a square-up: “The film you are about to see is based on documented Holocaust facts. The atrocities shown were conducted as medical experiments in special concentration camps throughout Hitler’s Third Reich. Although the Nazis and Schutzstaffel’s crimes against humanity are historically accurate, the characters depicted are composites of notorious Nazi personalities; and the events portrayed, have been condensed into one locality for dramatic purposes. Because of its shocking subject matter, this film is restricted to adult audiences only. We dedicate this film with the hope that these heinous, absolutely HORRIFIC crimes will never happen again.”

It also has its share of fake names. Herman Traeger is Friedman, Jonah Royston is Saxton, Flower used C.D. Lafleuer and Richard Kennedy was Wolfgang Roehm. The editor had to have used a fake name, as Kurt Schnit means “short cut” in German.

Despite — spoiler warning — Ilsa being shot in the head and her crimes being covered up, she somehow survived and appears in three sequels that all also end with her being killed or near-death.

Most incredibly, this was shot on the set of Hogan’s Heroes, which had been cancelled and was due to be toen down. The filmmakers told them they would be destroying it, which got them the use of the entire pre-built world that appears so much more sinister than it did when Colonel Klink was running things.