Il était une fois le diable aka Devil Story (1986)
(On Cable TV, August 2021) French-Canadian Horror TV channel FrissonTV currently airs “Nanarland,” a weekly summer showcase for terrible movies, accompanied by a half-hour show explaining and contextualizing what the heck we just saw. Even in this context, Il était une fois le diable is bad enough that it came with a disclaimer before the beginning of the film, warning viewers that watching the film to the end would be an ordeal. They were not kidding — Even by the standards of low-end horror films, it’s a wretched piece of nonsense, an incoherent blend of ill-fitting horror tropes, a thorough demonstration of directorial incompetence and a showcase for amateur “acting.” Put together for French regional theatrical exhibition, it has terrible audio-visual quality on top of its lack of other qualities. The opening has some hilarious attempt at creating horror out of camping slaughter (with the director keeping the camera on a terrible blood-spurting effect), but never mind because soon enough we’re off to land pirates, mummies and Nazi killers, as well as an old man shooting at a black horse through the night and into the morning. There’s more, but the more it adds, the less it makes sense — here’s a review that ends with a flowchart to showcase the absurdity of it all. It’s really bad: so disjointed that it’s difficult to stay invested in this as something other than a collection of sequences shot by director Bernard Launois with minimal crew and inexperienced actors, and so terrible from a cinematic point of view that there’s little artistry or wonder. (Although I did like the landlocked ship.) Il était une fois le diable is the kind of film fit to recalibrate your notions of what a terrible film can be: reading reviews taking pot shots at ambitious-but-misguided big-budget productions such as The Bonfire of Vanities is hilarious when you know how low the bottom of the barrel really goes. That, in the end, may be the greatest feat of wretched films: making us appreciate the better ones.