HALLOWEEN HORRORFEST 2019 OVERTIME!: The Devil’s Rock (2011)

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Welcome to the penultimate leg of our journey, sponsored by Evan from The Lurking Transmission!  Evan’s podcast presents a horror anthology every episode, a mix of horror fiction and music designed to tingle your spine and chill your bones.  Listen to the latest episode (and find links to other episodes and other ways to listen) here

Evan chose for me a entry from New Zealand, a bit of the ever-expanding genre of military horror called The Devil’s Rock.

Captain Ben Grogan (Craig Hall, who looks like Benedict Cumberbatch crossed with the Edge from U2) sneaks into a Nazi stronghold on a Channel island the day before D-Day.  His mission to sabotage the installation is...complicated when they find loads of dead Nazis, a member of the Waffen-SS specializing in occult services, and what looks like his dead wife Helena (Gina Varela) chained up in a room.  It turns out our last living Nazi, Meyer (Matthew Sunderland), was ordered to raise a succubus from Hell and he’s been working on a way to send her back.  Unfortunately, the ritual needs two people to complete....

This is basically a three-hander that is structured as a series of two-handers in the first two acts.  All three actors play off of each other well, even though I found director’s Paul Campion’s choice to overdub Varela with a more conventional ‘horror’ voice during her monstrous moments annoying...but then, there are a couple of time when Campion makes choices that made my eyes roll (can we please discontinue the use of a character vomiting to emphasize the entropic element’s horror?).  Even though there’s a ton of exposition in the second act, the script by Campion, Paul Finch and Brett Ihaka handles it very well; there is no feeling that everything stops dead.  Campion knows how to work his way around what was obviously a low budget feature, using canny editing to hide the fact that he can’t afford too advanced special effects.

The thing I liked about this film is how clean and simple it is even with all the expository argle bargle that could have muddied up the water.  There is a lot of grossness in the carnage left behind prior to our hero’s arrival, which adds to the ambiance.  Campion knows that the strength of his tale is in the pull-and-take between Hall and Sunderland, and wisely focuses on them.  Everyone has a character arc--even, to a very minor extent, the demon--and everything has a satisfying completion. 

There’s not much else I can say.  This is a solid little tale that comes in just under ninety minutes, has some good moments and creepiness, and does not drag in spite of all that back story.  I recommend it.

Tomorrow, only two (hopefully!) day late, is the finale of this year’s Horrorfest, and our sponsor is Mike Blanchard, the mastermind behind the Geek Cast Radio Network.  Mike has chosen Freddy’s Dead: The Last Nightmare, the...finale? of the Freddy Krueger franchise as it stood in the 90‘s.  Don’t pretend you forgot that one--it’s the one with Roseanne Barr in it.

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