Devil Story Blu-ray Review

The Blu-Ray presentation of "Devil Story" offers an impressively restored visual experience, sourced from a 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative. Presented in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio with AVC encoding, this release captures the film's gory and tactile details with an unexpectedly high level of clarity, making the best possible case for a movie that didn't originally receive meticulous care in production. The detail is remarkable, revealing makeup textures and gory special effects in vivid layers, as well as exterior shots that illuminate natural landscapes and architectural features. Despite a heavy but authentic film grain, the source material remains in excellent condition, featuring some light scratches and debris that do not detract significantly from the overall image quality.

Colors have been superbly rejuvenated, resulting in a vibrant palette where deep red blood and bright costumes, such as yellow rain gear, are showcased alongside exact greens in foliage and nuanced browns of tree bark. The blues of skies and water contrast beautifully, enriching scenes with inky black levels and convincingly natural skin tones. This lively color balance extends to the practical effects, highlighting the ghastly beauty of the film's gore with shades of red offset by darker purples and blues.

Vinegar Syndrome's transfer work ensures that despite "Devil Story’s" B-movie status, the visual storytelling remains engaging, with satisfactorily delineated textures in costumes and impressive latex makeup capturing a period-authentic look. Minor imperfections like warps and scratches do appear, but the cleanup job is commendable, preserving the B-movie charm while enhancing its cinematic qualities for new audiences.

The "Devil Story" Blu-Ray offers a 1.0 DTS-HD MA audio track available in both French and English, with the English version providing a slightly crisper experience. This mono mix delivers a modest presentation where repetitive sound effects and tinny scoring selections are characteristic. Despite its minimalistic engagement, it does capture some essence of the original suspense intended by the filmmakers, although it lacks the fully immersive quality found in more complex mixes.

Sound effects, though sparse, exhibit a somewhat comedic flair due to their repetitiveness—think of the same animal sound or a creaking door used over and over. While the score contributes adequately to building tension, it doesn't reach the grandeur of a truly enveloping surround sound experience. Nevertheless, the dialogue remains largely clear and comprehensible, albeit occasionally sounding tin-canny. Appreciably, Vinegar Syndrome has done commendable work in preserving and enhancing what was available.

Overall, this Blu-Ray offers an audio mix that comes across as functional yet charmingly quirky. It effectively conveys the film's narrative without overwhelming the senses or your sound system. The effort expended in optimizing this track reveals a commitment to maintaining authenticity while delivering a listenable experience in both languages.

The Blu Ray of "Devil Story" offers a compelling selection of extras that delve deep into the film's eccentricities and historical context. Director Bernard Launois leads a partial commentary exploring his creative process, casting decisions, and budget challenges. "Once Upon a Time...Devil Story" provides an engaging retrospective featuring key player interviews, including actress Veronique Renaud and film admirers, discussing the film's journey from conception to its cult status. The "Launois Story" presents an insightful 2018 interview, offering an analytical perspective on his filmmaking career. "French T.V. Coverage" is an intriguing local news report, spotlighting behind-the-scenes footage and Launois' ambition to surpass American horror cinema. The disc also includes a theatrical trailer that offers a visual summary of the film's unique aesthetic. A must-watch for enthusiasts of cult cinema.

Extras included in this disc:

• Select Scenes Commentary: Director Bernard Launois discusses specific scenes.
• Once Upon a Time...'Devil Story': Explores the movie's creation with key interviews.
• Launois Story: 2018 interview detailing the director's filmmaking journey.
• French T.V. Coverage: Local news report on the making of the film.
• Theatrical Trailer: Promotional trailer of the film.

"Devil Story" (1985) emerges as a fascinating, albeit baffling, entry in French exploitation cinema. Under the direction of Bernard Launois, who was stymied by budgetary constraints, the film spirals into a chaotic blend of horror elements and nonsensical storylines, much akin to the works of Ed Wood, yet uniquely French in its obsession with Nazisploitation. The narrative loosely follows a young woman, Veronique Renaud, navigating the eerie French countryside, stacked with inexplicably connected entities such as a meowing cat and a neighing horse, amidst her adventurous embrace of the bizarre. The sound design prominently features repetitive screams and animal noises in what appears to be Launois's intention to disorient and unsettle rather than narrate.

The film opens with a deformed killer in a Nazi uniform, ruthlessly dispatching campers, an outlandish character among others including an Egyptian mummy and a ghostly mother-son duo. These characters inhabit a reality disconnected from coherence, a surreal cascade of bizarre encounters, sporadic plotlines, and fragmented visuals. Launois indulges in gory spectacle but loses grip on narrative clarity, fashioning a classroom of absurdity heightened by synthesized musical loops accompanying inept murder scenes. This dreamlike, scattershot approach seems barely to contain the chaotic energy radiating from the screen.

"Devil Story" becomes an inadvertent parody of its genre, yielding entertainment through its disordered presentation rather than narrative accomplishment. Its allure resides not in coherent storytelling but rather in its status as a cult favorite ripe for satirical commentary. A visual and auditory labyrinth, the film captivates primarily those interested in dissecting its failures, affirming its position as a kooky cult piece that's as bewildering as it is entertaining. Vinegar Syndrome's Blu-ray release ensures "Devil Story" finds an audience ready to decipher—or delight in—its madness.

"Devil Story" offers a paradigm of cinematic misadventure, blending ambition with chaotic execution to produce a film worthy of cult status. Intended as a serious horror venture, its narrative spiraled into incoherence, attributable to a constrained budget and operational missteps. The resulting product is less a coherent story than an anthology of bewildering scenes that evoke a certain charm for those who revel in 'so bad it's good' cinema. The helmer, Launois, attempts to salvage this feature with creative, albeit disjointed, methods, rendering the film a quirky spectacle of unpredictability.

The Blu-ray release by Vinegar Syndrome gives "Devil Story" a new lease of life, offering strong video and audio quality that belies its notorious reputation. The presentation aids in amplifying its eccentricities, bringing vivid clarity to its bizarre aesthetics while an array of bonus features enriches the viewer's enjoyment. This release becomes a must-have for aficionados of notorious cinema failures, whose intrigue lies not in technical mastery or narrative solidity but in their earnest idiosyncrasies and unintentional humor.

In conclusion, "Devil Story" emerges as a fascinating study of cinematic ambition clashing with unyielding production limitations. While far from being conventionally good, it succeeds within its own niche as an entertaining spectacle of cinematic catastrophe. For audiences equipped with the right expectations—embracing curiosity over coherence—this Blu-ray offering delivers an experience both perplexing and strangely endearing. Recommended for those ready to indulge in its absurdity and appreciate its place in the hierarchy of beloved cinematic misfires.