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The Devil's Possessed
[Incredibly Strange Filmworks]
1974; color
Directed by Leon Klimovsky
Starring: Paul Naschy, Guillermo Bredeston, Norma Sebre, Mariano Vidal Molina & Eduardo Calvo
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Everyone's heard of a "sword and sandal" epic, but what about sword and Satan? Well, that's what Paul Naschy and his directing buddy Leon Klimovsky concocted in 1974 with The Devil's Possessed. (The film marks the pair's fifth collaboration.) This unpredictable and occasionally confusing collision of medieval gallantry and black magic does however showcase another classic Naschy performance. Here he plays Baron Gilles De Lancré, a retired Marshall whose years of military valor in service of his king are apparently still not enough to get a loan he requested, so he returns to his castle dejected but hellbent on his quest. Then he proceeds to get crazier and crazier as he works towards his goal of obtaining the "philosopher's stone," an alchemically created material rumored to give god-like powers of invincibility and immortality to whomever can posses it. Naschy's goaded on by his main lady in waiting, who's in cahoots with an alchemist, and the two of them convince the Baron to have his men begin harvesting local virgins so their blood can be used in the experiment to create the stone. While all this is going on, the serfs who live on his land begin to feel the sting of this new reign of terror and start to rebel. Their efforts are bolstered by the return to the area of another local nobleman, Gastone De Malebranche, who'd been a prisoner of war but was freed after a peace treaty. (He had fought alongside De Lancré, saved his life in battle, and cannot believe that such a once great man has sunk to such depths.) After a friendly reunion and banquet, one of De Lancré's men tries to kill De Malebranche while he's staying at the castle, thus turning friend into enemy real quick. De Malebranche gets hooked up with the rebels (who of course don't trust him at first because he's a nobleman) and proceeds to train them and help find a way to stop De Lancré once and for all. As the noose begins to close around De Lancré, his obsession with the stone becomes all consuming as he even kills his alchemist for letting him down. De Malebranche gets captured and is held prisoner but is quickly freed and gets to De Lancré just in time to stop his young sister from being sacrificed, which leads to the final showdown between the two and one of the all-time great Naschy death scenes. (He keeps talking and talking after basically becoming a human pin-cushion for about a dozen arrows until one finally goes through his neck and that shuts him up for good.) While I would still take another Waldemar Daninsky reprise over this any day of the week, this is definitely an interesting break from Naschy's more standard horror roles and one worth watching even for those who are not completists.
—the Kommandant
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