| Devil Story | |||||||
| Native Name: |
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| Director: | Bernard Launois | ||||||
| Starring: | Véronique Renaud Pascal Simon | ||||||
| Music: | Michel Roy | ||||||
| Editing: | Raymonde Battini | ||||||
| Production Companies: | Films Albatros Condor Films | ||||||
| Runtime: | 75 minutes | ||||||
| Country: | France | ||||||
| Language: | French | ||||||
Devil Story, also known as Il était une fois... le diable, is a 1986 French Nazisploitation[1] horror film written and directed by Bernard Launois. It is his seventh and last feature film. An uneven mixture of the slasher and Euro-gothic genres, it was largely condemned by critics for its incoherent script and technical incompetence. It has since gained a cult following because of its reputation as one of the worst films in history.
A seemingly deranged murderer in a German: [[Schutzstaffel]] uniform with a disfigured spine and pig-like[2] face terrorises a rural area of Normandy and slaughters whomever he encounters at random—first a couple of campers, then a man asking for directions to the nearest gas station.
A couple's car breaks down on the road, and they decide to stay at a nearby hotel until they can repair their car. The hotel is a modified old castle run by an elderly man and woman. The younger couple learn from their hosts that the place is cursed.
After initially released in 1986 in only a small number of theatres in French provinces, the film was shown in Paris as a double feature at, under the title Il était une fois... le diable.
In Spinegrinder: The Movies Most Critics Won't Write About, author and critic Clive Davies described the film as "75 mins of near-catatonic nonsense" with "a dumb, circular ending".[3] Scott Aaron Stine wrote in his The Gorehound's Guide to Splatter Films of the 1980s: "Despite the charming contrivances, [''Devil Story''] is just one more reason why French cinema rarely ventures or strays into splatter territory".[2] German: {{ill|Lexikon des internationalen Films|de|Lexikon des internationalen Films|fr|Lexikon des internationalen Films, a German-language reference work on all theatrical films and many television films released in Germany since 1945, noted the film's homages to John Carpenter's 1980 film The Fog.[4]
The film was released on VHS by a French company called American Vidéo in the late 1980s.[5]
The film was restored in 4K resolution from its 35mm original camera negative and released on Blu-ray by Vinegar Syndrome, an American home video distribution company, in 2021.[6] [7] This restored version was screened at the Fantastic Fest, an annual film festival in Austin, Texas, US, in September 2021.[8]