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[Review] ‘The Devil’s Hand’ Gets Its Fingers Caught In Editing
Amish horror. Not something you think of very much. It’s also not something many directors do, either. Sure, Wes Craven did Deadly Blessing, but those weren’t the Amish. Children Of The Corn? Again, close. It seems like hardly anyone’s really used the setting to really tell a good Amish horror story. With The Devil’s Hand, directed by Christian E. Christiansen and penned Karl Mueller, we’ve gotten our Amish horror story. Or not.
On the 6th day of the 6th month, six Amish women give birth to six daughters in New Bethlehem. Elder Beacon (Colm Meaney) believes this to be a bad omen, according to a prophecy of the Amish Antichrist, The Devil’s Hand. While one of the mothers does kill her baby (and herself), the remaining girls are spared. As the five remaining girls’ 18th birthday approaches, one of the girls, Mary (Alycia Debnam Carey), begins to have visions of the other girls being murdered. Like clockwork, the girls one by one begin showing up dead, just like it happened in Mary’s visions. Is Mary the Devil’s Hand, or is something else going on?
Being a sucker for Deep Space 9, Colm Meaney’s presence in the film grabbed my attention immediately. Yes, the show’s been off the air for almost 16 years, but damn it, it’s Chief O’Brien! And while his character is more than a little one-note with his constant harping on about fire and brimstone, I still got a kick out of him. As for the rest of the acting, it’s a mixed bag. Like Elder Beacon, many of the characters are one-dimensional. Jennifer Carpenter plays the entire film as Mary’s stepmother Rebekah with a permanent scowl, while Rufus Sewell does the concerned father thing as Jacob, but doesn’t have much more to do other than be a plot device. Thankfully for Carey, she’s given a little more to do as our protagonist, and is quite good with what she’s given.
Tone-wise, the film is best described as a slasher with supernatural elements thrown in. You have a whodunit with that nagging Antichrist aspect, but it also mixes in a coming-of-age story with Mary rebelling against her sheltered life in New Bethlehem. Is this the Amish idea of The Devil’s Hand? Probably not, but it would give way to accusations of being in league with Ol’ Scratch for not conforming to the rest of the town. Of course, I’m babbling and dragging this out, as there’s some serious problems with this one.
First off, look at how many editors tackled this film. Three are listed in the credits, and the film shows it. It’s a case of a film being edited to the point that there’s no focus. Scenes feel cut down, particularly when it comes to the horror aspects (gore, nudity, tension). And yeah, you have that coming-of-age story thing, which takes away the film’s focus as a slasher. The slasher aspects pop up sporadically, and only fully take over near the film’s conclusion. Really, the whole thing feels like it’s trying to reach multiple audiences that couldn’t care less. And yeah, it does sound like an all-too-familiar problem with certain horror films. There’s a reason why this film sat on the shelf for a couple of years, and had a name change from Where the Devil Hides. To top things off, The Devil’s Hand is far too dark at times to see just what’s going on. It’s like the crew for the lighting were on a tight budget.
As you’d guess, The Devil’s Hand isn’t what you’d call a great way to spend 100 minutes. While some of the acting is good, the characters are for the most part one-note, the horror aspects are undermined in favour of telling a CW-style melodrama, and the film just doesn’t take advantage of it’s setting to tell a compelling story. I would say throw it on for while you’re ironing, but you’ll probably get more enjoyment out of ironing clothes, and turn The Devil’s Hand off.
Video/Audio:
Presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, the film looks pretty good. Colours are consistent, as is the image detail (during scenes where you can see what’s transpiring, that is). There’s no apparent softness to the picture, and by the same token, no glaring edge enhancement or overbearing grain.
Unlike the video, the Dolby Digital 5.1 track does have some problems. For starters, it appears that the dialogue and sound effects are mostly relegated to the right rear channel. In fact, much of the sound originates from the rear speakers. There’s still some activity coming from the front channels, but overall the experience is haywire. The audio also didn’t appear to move around much, either. So much for the immersion.
Extras:
The only extra is the film’s Theatrical Trailer. Also included is the Ultraviolet copy of the film, and a slipcase replicating the cover art.
There’s something really insidious, in a great way, about setting a horror story in a movie theater. It’s something filmmakers have known for decades, going back to The Blob and beyond, but it never fails to strike a chord because, in a way, it hits us exactly where we feel safest. Seeing a horror movie on the big screen, surrounded by like-minded moviegoers, is a communal experience, one in which everyone screams and laughs together. We are together, and therefore we are much less vulnerable, so when someone punctures that bubble of safety, it’s all the more frightening.
Matinee (also released as Midnight Matinee in some territories) is a movie that understands this from the jump, setting up a stunning opening kill that predates a similar sequence in Scream 2 by almost a full decade. A smart, layered, very stylish Canadian slasher released at the tail end of the 1980s, it’s one of those films that’s spent a lot of time in the dark even among the horror faithful (I’m willing to admit that I hadn’t seen it until recently). Now, a new Kino Cult Blu-ray release is out to change that, and it reveals a slasher essential that, while not perfect, has charm and style to spare.
Two years ago, the Paramount Theater in the small town of Halston closed its doors when, during the theater’s annual horror festival, a young moviegoer was murdered in his seat, mid-movie. Leads in the murder quickly dried up, and the case is cold enough now that the town barely talks about it anymore. Fortunately for local horror fans, that means the Paramount can open again in time for its Halloween horror festival, and they’ve got a hotshot producer (William B. Davis) in town for just such an occasion.
As the festival draws closer, the film introduces us to a variety of characters, including rebellious teenager Sherri (Beatrice Boepple), her boyfriend Lawrence (Jeff Schultz), her overbearing mother Marilyn (Gillian Barber), and the theater’s kindly owner, Earle (Don S. Davis), who’s just hoping he can run a business without more bloodshed. But someone clearly remembers what happened two years ago, and their violent streak is on a collision course with opening night.
Matinee has quite a few things going for it, but what stands out right away, and maintains a consistent grip right up through a wonderful crescendo in the third act, is the film’s visual style. Writer/Director Richard Martin, cinematographer Cyrus Block, and special effects wizard Bob Comer make great use of the film’s limited locations, giving the movie a charming small-town feel reminiscent of Halloween or The Blob while building a self-contained little world inside the theater itself that’ll remind you of films like Popcorn and Demons.
The colors are striking, the framing is clever, and the film clearly has a ball making references to all kinds of other horror cinema moments ranging from The Phantom of the Opera to Friday the 13th. The kills, while relatively sparing with gore, are delivered with style and appropriate tension, creating that sense of unease right in the middle of a place where we as movie fans should be comfortable: The movie theater. Along the way, the Paramount itself becomes a character, and this release definitely dials up its retro splendor.
The Blu-ray upgrade preserves the film’s attention to detail and ambitious cinematography, helping the colors to pop while never letting go of the texture and feel of a relatively low-budget horror film made in Canada in the 1980s. There’s a certain gauziness to many exploitation films of this era, that haloed light you get when the scene is perhaps overexposed just a little too much. It makes the film dreamlike even when it reaches for realism, and Kino Cult’s upgrade preserves that feeling. Throw in a smart script and a whodunit plot that leans heavily into the psychological details of each character, and you’ve got a winner.
There are a couple of things that stick out as slight issues here, including the lack of special features beyond an excellent commentary from film historians and Kino regulars Jason Pichonsky and Paul Corupe. The disc is quite reasonably priced, so it’s not a letdown economically speaking, but I’d love a deeper dive into the film and the Canadian slasher boom in general, particularly for a movie like this that seems to have faded from so many memories, including mine. The sound mix also has some issues, probably left over from previous releases, that might have you playing with your volume settings a little more than you’d like over the course of a 90-minute film, particularly when lines of ADR dialogue crop up.
These are minor concerns, though, and they do nothing to diminish the impact of Matinee, or the joy that’ll come from watching this film for the first time if you’re a slasher devotee in search of something new, or even someone who saw this movie way back when hoping to relive its glories. This is one of those slashers I’ll be talking about with fellow horrorphiles for a long time, and it’s because of this disc.
Matinee is now available on Blu-ray from Kino Cult.
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