The Devonsville Terror (1983)

A witch curses the locals of Devonsville for burning her alive in The Devonsville Terror (1983)

So Susanna Love will probably be best remembered as the victim of an invisible rapist in a scene that enraged Siskel and Ebert in the 80s called The Boogeyman, one of the most well liked of Ulli Lommel’s mostly mediocre-to-bad career. I’m an absolute fan of The Boogeyman (this will definitely get the Darkside treatment one of these days), and The Devonsville Terror is often paired with it basically because of when they were released. While not a good-or-great film by any stretch, compared to the shit Lommel has made over the last decade, Devonsville is a masterpiece.

The Commonwealth of Devonsville, as the film opens, has sadists using the guise of spiritual sanctity just to fulfill their bloodlust, used God as a template to massacre liberal women considered witches or consorters with the “incubus”. So they could feed a victim to pigs and salivate (I laughed my ass off at the leader of this “purge”, as he licked his chops while she screams in agony as the pigs devour her!), bind another to a carriage wheel while holding a burning torch to her feet in a method of getting the poor girl to confess to worshiping the “deveel”. This has a bit of cheekiness to it as the torturer shows relish on his face as he makes an innocent suffer for something she is no part of. This is dated November, 1683. If you weren’t a woman devoted to a state of servitude and “purity” within the doctrine and watchful dictatorship of the Commonwealth (that means if you weren’t an independent woman, free-living and thinking), then the bastards came for you to satiate their thirst for shedding blood and torturing. One girl, the one tied to the wheel, is rolled down a hill, for Petesake! A final victim, burned alive while rope-tied to a tree is the real deal, and she curses the Inquisition as the lightening lights up the sky and moon.

Horror has certainly provided plenty of  witches or sorceresses declaring a curse on those who tormented/killed them films. Devonsville follows this. The inescapable scourge of a curse against all those that follow the bloodline of a certain group who decided to perform heinous acts towards the wrong one(s) is an old fashioned story that seems to be lasting even to today. The Devonsville Terror is a rather old fashioned film even after it arrives to 1983. Rural folk in a sleepy nothing town know that the curse is real; their unhappiness is visible, and the behavior of all in town evokes a heavy anvil pressing on their psyche and soul. I think Lommel sees rural America--particularly the dustbucket, bible belt, heartland, and if-you-blink-you'll-miss-it stops--and documents one such place, except this one has a witch's curse on it.

The film goes forward 300 years into present day 1983 as the anniversary of the Inquisition's purge is approaching. Susanna Love (Lommel's wife at the time, an "actress" figured highly in all the films she financed for him due to her heiress fortune) is a school teacher that arrives in Devonsville for a new job. The horny teenage males and young adult guys (and older uglies as well)  eyeball her. Paul Willson (the poor slob who just wanted to be part of the gang at Cheers) sees her naked. Yep, he's the owner/operator of a store. He "lost his wife" and would love to shack up with Love. So would all the guys in the film (including Robert Walker Jr. who has that face you would recognize due to his work in television in the 60s and 70s; he's the son of the actor who played the psychopath in Hitchcock's masterwork, Strangers on a Train). Walker is a decent character, at least. Pleasence sleepwalks like Willson through his role as a stoic doctor in the town who is a direct descendent of the chief executioner responsible for the witch's burning. Cursed with a flesh eating worm affliction (quite gross, as you might expect), Pleasence hopes like most of the town that their burdensome trial would be subsided. Pleasence's ancestor died of the worms and he feels he will suffer the same exact fate.

The ending shouldn't come as a surprise. Direct descendents of those who took out the women at the beginning choose unwisely to try the same torturous shenanigans with Love. This time, there's special effects Lommel can incorporate into his film like an exploding head right out of Scanners and a melting face right out of Raiders of the Lost Ark. There's even an ax to the head as an abused wife gets retribution for years of a sorry excuse of a husband treating her like shit.