Movie Review of the Day™ - The Devil's Rain

Heaven help us all when The Devil's Rain! That sentence makes no grammatical sense but it is the tag line of The Movie Review of the Day™: The Devil's Rain, one of the great bad movies of the 1970s. Follow an all-star cast as they do battle with Satan over human souls trapped within a glass orb in which there is constant rain.

That’s right, The Devil’s Rain!

All-star cast features William Shatner, wearing a bland, pre-TJ Hooker toupee, Ida Lupino, Tom Skerrit, Eddie “Green Acres” Albert, and Ernest Borgnine as the demonic Goat-Man man named Corbis.

This is a low budget movie so there's a lot of driving around. Lots of dirt roads. A small, old western town serves as the main location. A satanic church sits just on the edge of the abandoned town.

So this movie is very 70s, very dry, and very sweaty. Imagine being stuck out West with 1970s quality air-conditioning.

Get this, The Shat plays a man named Martin Fife - that’s right, Martin Fife - and for centuries his family has been hiding a book that contains the names of people whose souls have been promised to Satan (kind of like Beelzebug's accounting ledger, if you will.)

Corbis, the demonic Goat-Man, wants the book, needs the book. Why? Something to do with The Devil’s Rain, but what is The Devil’s Rain? No one knows. The Shat doesn't know. Corbis doesn't know. The filmmakers didn't know.

I have a copy of the screenplay (purchased from Script City because a free copy was nowhere to be found on the world wide Internet!) and it's as confusing as the finished movie. Funny thing, the screenplay has a few typos.

The Devil's Rain touches on ESP - what 70s movie didn't touch on ESP? Tom Skerrit and Eddie Albert are doctors that study the paranormal. Skerrit plays the Shat’s brother. Skerrit’s wife has ESP abilities and senses something is wrong back home.

John Travolta has a “blink and you’ll miss him” role as Danny. Anton LeVay and his Church of Satan were consultants on the film. Ernest Borgnine looks cool with horns.

The highlight of the film occurs when the cult members melt in The Devil's Rain during the climactic confrontation between good and evil. Green and yellow goo - looking for all the world like melted candle wax - oozes out of the cult members’ eye sockets. The melting scene goes on for what feels like hours but, man, it’s worth every sweaty 1970s minute.

Spread the word. People must see The Devil’s Rain.