WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Devil Hunter

Popular actress Laura Crawford (Ursula Buchfellner) and her wardrobe assistant Jane (Gisela Hahn) are in a coastal South American town scouting locations for a movie, when …

What’s that you say? Why would an actress and her wardrobe assistant be scouting locations, instead of, say, a director and a production designer? Hush now, this is a Jess Franco film and logic has no place.

So, these two blonde hotties are in South America when Jane pulls some spectacular turncoat shenanigans and, in cahoots with Chris (Werner Pochath) and Thomas (Antonio de Cabo), kidnaps Laura and hauls her off to a jungle-infested island to wait for the studio head to cough up a $6million ransom. Said island has been glimpsed in the opening montage which juxtaposes Laura’s carefree lifestyle with the chase, capture and sacrifice to a deformed cannibal, of a native girl. Jess Franco drawing parallels, y’all.

While Chris starts going loco because he doesn’t like the jungle (“this wild vegetation gives me the creeps”), Thomas molests Laura and …

What’s that? Aren’t kidnappers supposed to worry about damaged goods/non-provision of spondoolies scenarios? In the real word, maybe, but this a Jesus Franco joint, people, and sexual violence is kind of obligatory.

So, Thomas does the nasty, Jane watches laughingly, and Chris rages at the flora and fauna. Meanwhile the studio hires man-of-action Peter Weston (Al Cliver) to make the ransom payment with the understanding that if he comes back with Laura and the six mill, he gets 10%. Of the money. What he’d do with 10% of an actress I don’t know.

Peter hooks up with helicopter pilot Jack (Antonio Mayans) who starts getting Vietnam flashbacks the moment they encounter a bit of a greenery and promptly has a meltdown as girlishly embarrassing as Chris’s “wild vegetation” pussy out. Jess Franco drawing parallels again, y’all. They make contact with the kidnappers, intending to throw them a ringer. Both parties double-cross each other, shots are fired, and in the ensuing chaos, Laura goes on the run and Jack’s helicopter is blown up (the helicopter-disappears-behind-cliff/puff-of-smoke-rises edit doesn’t quite match).

This rousing action scene deathly dull set piece lays the groundwork for the film’s second half, in which everyone wanders interminably around the jungle – which really irks the plant-hating Chris – and various individuals meet gory and unconvincing deaths (you know how in cheap movies, the blood looks like red paint? In ‘The Devil Hunter’ it looks like orange paint. Fucking orange!) while the deformed cannibal (Bertrand Altmann) goes trawling for white poontang.

A word on the deformed cannibal: he has ping-pong balls for eyes and plasticene smeared across his face. He also shuffles through the film – and I do mean shuffles; scenes where he ambles towards the camera, arms outstretched, last several minutes at a time – stark bollock naked. Indeed, in his climactic showdown with Peter, his penis flops around all over the place as the two of them grapple. Said fight is as badly staged as anything else on display here, gifting the word with images such as this …

… and providing an insight into what Derek Jarman’s ‘Sebastiane’ remade by Joe d’Amato might look like. But I digress, this is un film de Jesus Franco and any homoerotic (or judging by the above image homoironic) undertones are purely accidental. Accidental, you hear me? Why else would we have the visual pleasures of an equally naked Muriel Montosse (credited solely as “girl on yacht”) …

… or Buchfellner denuded and anointed with flowers by native girls?

‘The Devil Hunter’ is the kind of movie that should be 80 minutes long, joyously trashy and grubbily sexy. As it stands, it’s an hour three quarters (it feels like twice that), it’s joyless rather than joyous, and even the outrageous swathes of nudity (in the Jess Franco school of filmmaking native girl = booty shot) fail to generate any real eroticism. On the plus side Franco’s trademark zooms are largely absent; however (and even allowing for Severin DVD’s appalling murky print), shots utterly refuse to match:

I’ve seen plenty of cheapies that rely on day-for-night shots. ‘The Devil Hunter’ is perhaps the only film I’ve ever seen that throws in some night-for-day. But then again, it passes off its cast for actors and its narrative meanderings for a plot, so at least it’s consistent in its ineptitude.