On
the eve of D-Day, a couple of New Zealander commandos (their nationality
a sop to the film’s financiers rather than a sensible plot
point) land on a remote Channel Island to take out a German bunker.
On hearing the cries of people apparently being tortured, the
pair venture inside the fortress, only to find dead Nazis and
an ominous occult book. When one of the commandos is offed by
a surviving Nazi , the survivor has to team up with his enemy
to fend off a demon, summoned as part of Hitler’s occult
obsessions, that is able to take the form of loved ones in order
to seduce its victims, and which has managed to escape its bonds.
The Devil’s Rock is a film that really
should be good, but somehow fails to live up its own ambition.
While the film certainly looks impressive, the story and the action
are far too hackneyed and predictable, and little that happens
makes real sense. For instance, once our hero has seen what appeared
to be his dead wife transform into a monster, you’d think
he’d be fairly safe from being seduced again, but sure enough,
as soon as the demon takes his wife’s form again, he’s
all torn and confused. The dialogue suggests screenwriter Paul
Finch was being paid extra each time someone says ‘fuck’,
and the characters are pretty one-dimensional – you immediately
know the Nazi character can’t be trusted (he has all the
depth of a 1960’s British comic book Nazi) while the two
commandos are both pretty annoying.
The
demon, sadly, is like a female version of Tim Curry in Legend
– hardly a scary creation, and made worse with an Exorcist-style
double-tracked deep voice. I’d be genuinely surprised if
audiences weren’t guffawing throughout its cliché-ridden
screen time. The gore is plentiful and impressive, but no film
can live by gore alone, and this film wastes some early atmospherics
and instead ploughs into a noisy but tedious exorcism scene that
feels as though it’s taking up half the running time.
The Devil’s Rock has some great locations,
impressive sets and strong moments, but on the whole, it feels
like a low-end rehash of The Keep that is not so much bad
as nondescript.
The DVD does have extensive – if rather strangely edited
– behind-the-scenes footage that is actually a lot more
interesting that the final film.
On
the eve of D-Day, a couple of New Zealander commandos (their nationality
a sop to the film’s financiers rather than a sensible plot
point) land on a remote Channel Island to take out a German bunker.
On hearing the cries of people apparently being tortured, the
pair venture inside the fortress, only to find dead Nazis and
an ominous occult book. When one of the commandos is offed by
a surviving Nazi , the survivor has to team up with his enemy
to fend off a demon, summoned as part of Hitler’s occult
obsessions, that is able to take the form of loved ones in order
to seduce its victims, and which has managed to escape its bonds.
The
demon, sadly, is like a female version of Tim Curry in Legend
– hardly a scary creation, and made worse with an Exorcist-style
double-tracked deep voice. I’d be genuinely surprised if
audiences weren’t guffawing throughout its cliché-ridden
screen time. The gore is plentiful and impressive, but no film
can live by gore alone, and this film wastes some early atmospherics
and instead ploughs into a noisy but tedious exorcism scene that
feels as though it’s taking up half the running time.