Mark of the Devil
Directed by Michael Armstrong & Adrian Hoven
Starring Herbert Lom, Udo Kier, Olivera Katarina, Reggie Nalder, Herbert Fux, , Gaby Fuchs, Johannes Buzalski, Adrian Hoven, Ingeborg Schöner
It has been quite a while since I sat down with this notorious little film. And after watching it, I remember why it has been so long. For me, this is a very brutal and disturbing film. Not in the sense of something like Cannibal Holocaust, but because this really is based on historical fact, and what the church and their underlings did to innocent people, for reasons of greed, lust, jealousy, and just about every other sin there was. I mean, you have a group of nuns being attacked and raped in the first few minutes of the film, so that sets the tone pretty quickly. Watching this story unfold once again in front of me, it brought forth my feelings towards this kind of religious fever and terror from a group that is supposed to be about peace and love. In his book Horror Films of the 1970s, author John Kenneth Muir writes that this “film exists solely to catalogue man’s brutality against man.” I completely agree with that, but think that is the reasoning behind it, to show what we as a race have done to each other. This film shows a very unsettling period of time then, and sometimes makes me think we could go through that all over again.
kitleyskrypt.com 