Shatner on the Altar: HORROR AT 37,000 FEET, DEVIL'S RAIN, KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS

The 70s TV movie had to borrow from at least three currently popular themes of the hour, so here we get the ancient curse, the social commentary, and the ensemble disaster movie cast format (a welcome form of actor equity: faded stars, child actors, nearly-ran starlets, and granite-jawed authority figures --see also: DAY OF THE ANIMALS). They board a jumbo jet luxury "airplane" hauling a massively heavy Celtic altar, and a dog. And the downstairs storage freezes --the dog is frozen solid! And the plane become suspended at 37,000 feet, trapped in a crossfire of wind tunnels, providing an ingenious explanation of why the plane interiors never once giving the impression of movement.


The result is a kind of zero point surreal experience where some smoke wafting up from a hole in the carpet and the occasional Val Lewtonian shadow substitutes for any kind of literal monster or concrete threat. The strange fascination with sub zero temperatures on a plane (just touching the door makes Chuck's whole arm go numb) goes well with the array of locked-in ensemble types (look it's Buddy Ebsen!) awaiting their line in the script with the reserved confusion of a Sartre play directed by Rod Serling's nephew after too a night of too many olives in martinis.


The sparse passengers include a wild-eyed single lady (the dog's owner, though she seems to forget all about him after awhile, or perhaps just wasn't brave enough to try and compete for the camera's attention against all those other needy hams). She's the best thing about the film, and she knows all about the stone's colorful human sacrifice-enriched past, her eyes alight with ancient magick. Chuck Connors is the square-jawed pilot; Shatner the quintessential priest who lost his faith (I was shocked when a hot stewardess in a short skirt wanted to confiscate his flask - when meanwhile he's also helping himself to the bar without paying, which doesn't bother her at all). Once he's drunk enough, Shatner laughs ruefully at their collective fate, though snaps to life when the other passengers contemplate child sacrifice after first trying to pacify the spirit with the kid's doll as effigy. Will they commit the ultimate transgression or will the dawn come up in time? We'll find out after this brief fade out where commercials once played, dissipating whatever tensions may have accrued.


It all moves pretty fast and fans of Italian horror can luxuriate in the colorful red lights of the cockpit and everyone can notice the way one of the actresses has a Rosemary Woodhouse buzz cut and sweat sheen, and another looks like Carrie White (though that film was still three years away). Naturally unless you were around in the 70s and remember these kinds of TV events, you're far less likely to care. But those of us who were kids will be glad to know the DVD of this looks way better than most. If only SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS and DEATH AT LOVE HOUSE would one day get the same respectful treatment. May Cheesy Flix die a thousand deaths for its profaning the profane and blurring the Kate Jackson!
I've seen hellfire and I've seen face-melting rain - and it's not, um, a great movie, but for kids from the 70s THE DEVIL'S RAIN is an unholy and powerful relic, its TV spots an inescapable part of local prime time TV in 1975. I was eight and had a bizarre childhood dream about them and even now there's a lingering prepubescently perverse erotic charge associated with imagining acid rain hitting me and my coven and melting us all down like so much birthday candle wax. We'd heard DEVIL'S RAIN was lousy, but my dream was amazing, and if I wasn't so savvy about cinema even at eight years-old, and it was the 80s instead of the 70s, and a careerist child psychologist heard my dream, he'd probably think I was abducted by Satanists and convinced it was only a dream through hypnosis, and they'd arrest my parents and teachers. But in the 70s it was anybody's game, a whole Middle America demographic gone to the devil with touchy feely cocktails, bridge, Jaycees, smoking on planes, turtleneck and medallion conclaves of wife-swappers, all-night block parties leading into softball breakfast picnics of still-drunk adults and kids high on their very first sunrise and sleep deprivation. So in rode devil films, a parallel subconscious repository that all of us, down to the smallest most impressionable infant, knew was only fantasy, yet a fantasy so powerful it spilled over into our collective subconscious, leading to witch hunts in the 1980s and the rise of nervous micro-managing overprotective brand parenting.


That feeling of these films having some supernatural power is gone, but as a kid growing up in the Satanic 70s just seeing the TV commercial for an R-rated horror movie was enough to give you sexy nightmares and make the world seem full of strange telekinetic magic and unimaginable terror. And when we imagined the effects of the then brand-new acid rain, the DEVIL'S RAIN is what we imagined.