To the Devil a Daughter

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day...

 

To the Devil a Daughter (1976) The last Hammer horror film. Would that they have gone out with something better.

 

It looks so promising, though. With a cast that features Christopher Lee, Richard Widmark, Honor Blackman, Denholm Elliott, and a pre-fame Nastassja Kinski, photographed by an A-list cinematographer, based on a novel by the same author of Hammer's The Devil Rides Out (Lee's favorite of his many Hammer films). But that 1967 film boasted a script by Richard Matheson and was directed by Hammer's most successful director, artistically and financially, Terence Fisher.

 

To the Devil a Daughter had neither of them.

 

The movie bounces back and forth in time, but the story proper begins when writer John Verney (Widmark) is on a book tour in London promoting his latest book on the occult, "The Devil Walks Among Us." At a party given by his friends Anna (Blackman) and David (Anthony Valentine), Verney is approached by Henry Beddowes (Elliott), who asks Verney a favor. Will he go to Heathrow Airport pick up his daughter Catherine (Kinski), who he believes to be in the hands of a mysterious religious sect called Children of the Lord. Why can't he go himself? Well, that's a long story to be told in flashback later.

A flashback more recent than the one that starts the movie, where Father Michael Rayner (Lee) is excommunicated from the Catholic Church for heresy. Rayner, it seems, has gone over to "the dark side" and, in Bavaria, established the Children has a satanic cult with the intention of bringing an incarnation of the demon Astaroth to Earth. And who does he plan to be the bearer of such deviltry? Why, Catherine, of course, who has been raised by the sect for just such purposes, as promised to them by her mother, a member of the Children. Henry was witness to all this and forced not to interfere lest he come to a hellish end.

Hence the machinations of putting Verney into the middle of it, as he "knows the occult" and might be able to fight off the Order. It seems a bit flimsy—Michael Crichton wrote about medicine, but I think I'd want a different doctor to operate on me—but the movie's got to start somewhere. Verney manages to fool Catherine's minders and stash her in his apartment, but Rayner and his flock use black magic and all sorts of arcana to try and find Catherine, and its up to Verney to try to save her soul.  

Despite a good cast and the photography of David Watkin (he worked on it between shooting Mahogany and Robin and Marian), To the Devil a Daughter is some of the worst kind of ghoulish tripe to come out of the post-Exorcist era, taking itself way too seriously, even while some of the instances and special effects make you want to giggle (a bloody demon puppet being the most egregious example). Despite all this, the cast remains stoic and professional, not even hinting of suppressed laughter or inordinate eye-rolling (although Widmark, reportedly, tried to quit a couple times. Damn professional, I think. The creepiest thing about it is Kinski was only fourteen when she made it—it was her second film—and a lot was asked of her. In fact, too much.

 

After the movie came out, Wheatley, who found it not only inept, but obscene, asked Hammer to never again adapt one of his novels. Now, that's saying something. But, one could hardly blame him. The only reason to see it, actually, is for Lee, who thought highly of Wheatley, and seemed to relish the chance to do a Draculish version of a cleric, combining priestly authority with malevolence.