Monday 29 July 2013

Mark of the Devil - Will's Review

I was quite looking forward to the week's movie; it's a reader recommendation (via our Facebook Page), and it has Udo Kier in it!

Our last Reader Request was Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, while Naziploitation isn't my favourite genre, Ilsa was one of the better examples.

Sadly this weeks movie is, in all but the trappings, a run of the mill naziplotation movie. Swap out Nazis for the church, the SS for witchfinders, Jews for peasants, and the Camp for a small village, and it's the same old same old.
The acting is terrible, save for Keir; who doesn't exactly give a career best performance himself, and spends most of the film in trousers so tight that an interested observer could probably narrow down his religion.
Against the stock background of people (mostly women) being tortured is the story of the Witch-finder general's student/protégé/apprentice (Kier) realising that his beliefs are not all they're cracked up to be.

Aside from that its a fairly standard 70s/80s torture movie; nothing to write home about, but not terrible either.

2 comments:

  1. Yea pretty much agreed. I may have to pay those trousers another visit to see what I was missing!

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  2. In the context of Italian film I heard the term "hat movie". The idea I guess was that a story could be plucked off the shelf and re-invented with different costumes- westerns became war films or occasionally poliziotteschi.

    Anyhow in this case you are right this is nazisploitation which in itself is often a take on the W.I.P genre as is occasionally Nunsploitation. It is certainly a million miles from The Devils. Incidentally I noticed a few goofs early on but since it seemed as though there were going to be a lot of these I gave up on that :)

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