There’s hardly any need at this stage to say that the late Jess Franco was one of the most prolific low-brow filmmakers we’ve ever known, but the terrific plus side to his frenetic pace of work during a nearly sixty-year career is that, for most of us, there’s still a wealth of film titles out there we’ve yet to see. Well, I may have subtracted one from that still significant number with Devil Hunter, but as ever with Franco, I had an absolute blast. They’re fun films to watch, they’re fun to write about, and provided you’re happy with knowing that you are not going to be wowed with snazzy SFX or indeed slick production values, then you’ll have a blast with Devil Hunter or any number of Franco’s films too. No one has ever come along to take Franco’s place – turning out busy, entertaining exploitation films which have an odd sort of joie de vivre.
This looks at first to be your common-or-garden cannibal exploitation movie: a young woman runs, arms flailing, through an unnamed jungle, with a band of men in pursuit. Now, were you to think that only in such remote climes could a woman be travelling at speed, waving her arms around, scantily clad, then you’d be wrong. We get a cut scene to a young woman hanging over the top of a convertible, waving her arms around in a very similar way, and herself only minimally clad. That’s parity, that is. And this young blonde lady, recently arrived in the faintly unlikely movie hotbed that is Benidorm, is Laura Crawford (Ursula Buchfellner) – a massive star and pin-up.
After some ebullient dog-walking, she’s busy getting on with her languid soft-focus existence when all of a once, she’s ambushed in the bath (natch) and kidnapped. Now, here we have one of the film’s many gloriously daft moments: Ms. Crawford seems to be subdued with a bit of Silvikrin, which is being brandished by some guys in the worst disguises you could imagine. True, they have put stockings on their heads, but somehow this has had the effect of their facial features being brought into even sharper relief. Anyway, our Laura is taken off, to somewhere unnamed, but suspiciously like the jungle we saw earlier. The plan is to ransom Ms. Crawford for Silly Money, and hide her in the jungle (?!) until that ransom is paid.
But wait…could it be that the cannibal shenanigans we thought we saw earlier have a bit more about them than it first seemed? Is that some kind of…zombie on the loose? And is that bloodshot-eyed idol which the locals all hold in some kind of dread reverence the key to understanding all of this? (Yes to all.)
Anyway, Laura Crawford’s people begin working on a plan to retrieve her, sending off a Vietnam vet and…a guy with awesome boots, who isn’t above making it look like he’s climbing a vertical cliff face when in fact, they’ve put the camera on its side, and he’s actually on the floor, pretending. The tree growing bountifully at what would be a perfect ninety-degree angle to the ‘cliff’ is a dead giveaway. With regards the veteran, there’s even a PTSD-flavoured sequence in here on his account; this film really does have it all.
The ensuing melee between captors and rescuers, not to mention of course Mr Googly Eyes on the prowl, leads to a series of highly entertaining scenes, all shot through with classic mid-period Franco fare: barely-excused nudity, super-zoom shots, camp dialogue and a weird, unmistakable feeling that everything going on here must have been fun to shoot. There’s a little, only a very little, dead time before the grande finale. Sure, it’s a tree, again, which breaks the spell of the profound isolation of this ‘jungle’ by having loads of European names carved into it, but so what? This is a film designed to be baffling and gratuitous, and it achieves this from start to finish.
If it sounds like I’m knocking Franco in any respects here, then assuredly I’m not. I thoroughly enjoyed Devil Hunter. Whilst Uncle Jess may not have purposefully set out to make comedies (well, mostly), he did set out to make films that people could simply enjoy, and so here we are. In fact, this was a ‘video nasty’ at one point, though all that says is that they’d ban anything in those days. Oh, sure, it has T&A, some garish (if at least ambitious) gore and various exploitation elements, which mean this would probably be a poor choice of entry-level film for anyone who didn’t have at least a passing understanding of the genre or the director, but for the likes of us, this is bloody improbable fun. I’d go further and say that all the mugs giving this bad reviews on IMDb and similar outlets have probably missed the point and they shouldn’t be given nice things.
Devil Hunter will be released by 88 Films on April 8th 2019.