The Devil’s Men (1976)

Day 85 of Sobriety. 

Also known in its truncated form (minus all the blood and nudity) as Land of the Minotaur, The Devil’s Men is a very strange Greek production from 1976 starring Donald Pleasence and Peter Cushing. The goofy plot is about an Irish priest living in Greece who enlists the aid of a New York detective and a young, nubile archeology student to investigate an evil Minotaur-worshiping cult that is abducting and sacrificing tourists.

At first, probably due to the presence of Peter Cushing, I thought this was going to a passable stand-in for a similar period Hammer production, but I was stripped of that delusion pretty quickly. This movie is pretty dumb and schlocky. The plot is absurd, as is most of the dialogue. I think it is dubbed, but Donald Pleasence delivers his lines with a very hammy Irish accent, and Peter Cushing just seems like he wishes he was somewhere else. I was pretty surprised that two stars of their caliber were in a movie like this, and also that Brian Eno provided the soundtrack. I guess that must be where a large portion of the film’s budget went, because it sure didn’t go on creating the “menacing” paper mâché minotaur idol, replete with flaming nostrils.

 

There is much that can be criticized or jeered at in this film, but, for what it is, I found it actually pretty enjoyable. There is plenty of eye-candy in the form of young, hot women (and men, I guess) in very cool (and often very revealing) 1970s fashions. It played more like a trashy low-budget Italian or Spanish exploitation film than a Hammer movie.

It seems like it was at least tentatively planned as the first of a franchise of films involving the oddball team of Father Roche, Pleasence’s bumbling Irish priest, and the slick, hard-boiled New York detective Milo (played by Greek actor Kostas Karagiorgis, who I am unfamiliar with). But no further episodes materialized. This is not really surprising as neither of those characters are particularly likeable. Father Roche is a kindhearted but very conservative walking cliché, and Milo, ostensibly the leading man, is the kind of guy who enjoys speeding his car to freak out the passengers and believes that the best way to calm down a panic-stricken woman is to slap her. In other words, he is a bit of a tosser.

Brian Eno’s score was pretty unremarkable, but one thing the film does have going for it are excellent locations—it is shot in and around a ruined Greek temple and in small Greek villages. It is a fun, dumb film that can be enjoyed if you fancy giving your brain a holiday.