The Travolta/Cage Project #1 The Devil's Rain (1975)
Welcome, friends, to the very first, underwhelming installment of Travolta/Cage. It’s an epic, multi-media pop culture quest during which me and my podcasting partner Clint Worthington will watch and talk about every John Travolta and Nicolas Cage movie in chronological order for the podcast Travolta/Cage and I will write about every movie Cage and Travolta have appeared in for this website/column with an eye towards turning it into a book at the end of this very long road in the same way I did with The Weird Accordion to Al.
With that epic journey ended, and an amazing book on the way, I figured it was time and for me and Clint’s new challenge and I cannot think of two trash culture icons I would rather spend four or five years obsessing about.
The auspicious film career of John Travolta, arguably the greatest actor and human being in history, began on an almost auspiciously inauspicious note.
Before he was Danny Zuko, Tony Manero, Chili Palmer or Vincent Vega Travolta made a wildly forgettable debut as Danny in 1975’s The Devil’s Rain, a movie that is infinitely more boring than a horror film prominently featuring Ernest Borgnine sacrificing William Shatner to Satan has any right to be.
The most fascinating aspect of Travolta’s participation in The Devil’s Rain might just be the placement of his excessively generous credits. Travolta is a glorified extra in The Devil’s Rain. He has no dialogue, is onscreen for about a minute and that gorgeous punim of his is unrecognizable under prosthetics designed to make him look like a melty face Satanic zombie with no eyes.
Not his best look, to be honest.
Yet for some reason this bit player not only has a name but makes it into the opening credits, between screen legend and pioneering filmmaker Ida Lupino and superstar Satan worshipper Anton LaVey as the film’s technical advisor.
LaVey did a terrible job. The devil comes off terribly in The Devil’s Rain, like a real weenie.
Travolta must have learned a lot from The Devil’s Rain. The rising star went from playing a brainwashed member of a sinister cult who does the devil’s bidding unthinkingly and sacrifices his free will to serve a charismatic charlatan to becoming a high-profile member of Scientology, a sinister cult that requires members to do the devil’s bidding, sacrifice their free will and serve a charismatic charlatan named L. Ron Hubbard.
The Devil’s Rain opens with the muted sounds of screaming accompanied by a series of nightmarish images from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. The filmmakers probably thought this would be an atmospheric and vivid way to kick off their unwatchable insult of a motion picture but I gotta say I think they really Bosched the opening.
Oh, but we have fun!
The Devil’s Rain begins, confusingly enough, at what feels much closer to an end than a beginning. We open, appropriately enough, in the middle of a terrible rainstorm of Satanic precipitation, with Steve (George Sawaya), the patriarch of the Preston family, visiting his wife Emma (Ida Lupino, in a role that punishes rather than rewards her history as a pioneering female filmmaker) and son Mark (Shatner) to encourage them to give an evil book back to Jonathan Corbis (Ernest Borgnine), a Satanic cult leader desperate to get into the Devil’s good graces.
I’m guessing Borgnine’s favorite David O. Russell film was Spanking the Monkey
Academy Award-winner Borgnine plays a figure of infinite evil power who uses his personal magnetism to win souls to the devil, a role similar to his longtime real-life gig leading Milwaukee’s Great Circus Parade in clown make-up.
Borgnine is famous for his legendary roles in Marty, The Wild Bunch, McHale’s Navy and From Here To Eternity and famous predilection for frenzied late in life masturbation. In a move that elevated the legendary character actor to hero status, Borgnine answered an innocuous question about how he stayed so young and vibrant at 93 from the vultures at Fox & Friends by positing frenzied onanism as the key to staying young.
By that point in his life, Borgnine had clearly run out of fucks to give, and felt no need to pretend that spanking the trouser salami was not one of the great joys left in his heroically ancient existence. I fucking love Robert Forster and Warren Oates but do I know anything about their self-pleasuring routines? Do I know whether or not they whiled aways the hours slapping the bologna pony until their little soldiers were ready to salute? No, I do not, and frankly I feel cheated.
Borgnine dominates The Devil’s Rain as a dedicated follower of Satan who has been tormenting the poor Preston family for literally centuries, dating back to the pilgrim days, when Corbis was burned at the stake for being a witch, a development that only seems to have made him stronger.
Yeah, baby!
Mark decides to confront his family’s devil-worshipping arch-nemeses once and for all. He challenges the Satanic cult leader to a faith-off/face-off pitting God against the devil. That does not work out well for Mark, who ends up getting sacrificed to the devil and later becomes a Satanic zombie creature with no eyes and a melty face.
Playing a man at war with Satan and also the Satanist leader who simply will not let his family be in a staggeringly awful Satanic horror movie catapults the Star Trek actor to new heights of subtlety, understatement and restraint.
When Mark goes missing, his brother Tom (Tom Skeritt), whose girlfriend conveniently happens to be a psychic, decides to go looking for him. The Devil’s Rain artificially cultivates an aura of mystery by making very little sense. The Devil’s Rain purposefully and deliberately withholds information that wouldn’t make the movie any scarier or better but would render it, at the very least, coherent.
What the fuck’s going on? Who’s that guy? How on earth did they get name actors like Shatner, Lupino, Eddie Albert, Skerritt, Keenan Wynn and Borgnine to waste their time in this nonsense?
#HornyDevil
The Devil’s Rain doesn’t even have the decency to rip off The Exorcist successfully. In the aftermath of William Friedkin’s zeitgeist-capturing smash Satan was the hottest thing in Hollywood, even more so than before but The Devil’s Rain is fatally lacking in exorcisms as well as spookiness and tension.
I was apoplectic watching The Devil’s Rain because it is insultingly terrible but also because I watched it exclusively for a podcast, online column and eventual book devoted to Nicolas Cage and John Travolta and I was horrified to discover that despite the film being Travolta’s cinematic debut he’s barely in it.
I watched The Devil’s Rain many, many years ago when I worked for the A.V Club and half-remembered Travolta having a small but important role, the kind involving at least one line of dialogue and more than a minute onscreen. I was wrong. My memory failed me. If I’d realized what a non-entity Travolta was in the film I might never have watched it.
The Devil’s Rain has distinctions beyond being the film debut of John Travolta, the world’s greatest actor and an egregious waste of many great old character actors’ time and energy. Borgnine could have pleasured himself thousands of times in the weeks and months he wasted starring in The Devil’s Rain.
A life mask was made of William Shatner’s face for the sequences late in the film where he’s a melty faced, eyeless ghoul mindlessly serving the Anti-Christ by Don Post Studios, the leading name in freaky-ass masks that understandably bears an unmistakable resemblance to another mask made by Don Post Studios based on Shatner’s facial features: the mask Michael Myers wears in Halloween.
How shitty and forgettable is The Devil’s Rain? Even its props went on to bigger and better things. Travolta, meanwhile, would score substantially more screen time in his next big screen appearance, a horror film with a decidedly better pedigree that would launch the careers not just of Travolta but also Amy Irving, William Katt, Halloween star P.J Soles and Nancy Allen: Carrie.
Things would only improve for Travolta after The Devil’s Rain. Oh sure, he would go on to make an epic number of staggeringly terrible movies in the ensuing years but at least he had dialogue and wasn’t playing a melty-face Satanic extra.
Even though Travolta/Cage is devoted to covering the entirety of both actors’ film careers, I’m not going to waste Clint or our first guest’s time on a movie that’s flaming garbage and also just barely a John Travolta movie.
It’s hard to believe that the greatest hero’s journey in the history of American entertainment began on an impressively unimpressive note.
The Devil’s Rain was the first awful movie Travolta made. As this column will extensively, even exhaustively and hopefully entertainingly illustrate, it would not be his last.
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