The Devonsville Terror (1983).
The film starts three-hundred years prior in the New England town of Devonsville, 1683, as a woman is mixing ingredients into a giant cauldron heated by a wooden fire. I’m not sure what she was making in this pot, but it looked like enough soup to feed two-hundred people. Unfortunately, she never gets to try the soup, because a bunch of townspeople snare her and two other women because they’ve been branded as witches. With expedient “trials”, they’re all found guilty and sentenced to die in gruesome ways - one is fed to pigs, one is burned alive, and the worst one is strapped back-first to a wooden wheel that’s then set on fire and rolled down a hill, crushing her face and body with every rotation.
We then flip to the present. Devonsville is your typical backwoods yokel town, a place where there’s one shitty general store and the doctor is also the mortician and the town psychic. A woman named Jenny Scanlon gets off of the bus with a suitcase and a dream - to be a grade-school teacher at what’s probably the only school in town. The rest of the townsfolk appear to be incel men. There’s Walter Gibbs, the general store owner who recently killed his sick wife by suffocating her with a pillow because she wouldn’t shut up, Ralph Pendleton, an old dude who constantly tells his wife to shut up, and then a few guys in their mid-late 20’s who just can’t stand the idea of a woman working or having their own thoughts. Jenny quickly makes friends with two women, but the townspeople really don’t like that.
As the Devonsville Terror progressed, it felt more prescient than ever. The men in this town - uneducated, inundated by local superstition and the uninformed word of their elders, continuously working to both indoctrinate their children while holding down the rights of women. They have a big problem with these three women, and not just because they’re outsiders. They hate one because she’s a radio DJ who is trying to preach female empowerment. They hate another because she cares about the environment. And finally, they hate one because they think she told her class that God could be a female and that she’s sexually teasing the simple townsfolk by walking around and living her life. The rural town pictured here could have easily been 1683, 1983, or 2023. I saw very little difference between the men in this film and the ones packing the parking lot of drag shows with American flag button-ups and ‘Stop the Steal’ signs.
Donald Pleasance plays the town doctor, whose office is carpeted wall to wall and features a giant deer head mounted on the wall. He’s the only one interested in helping Jenny, who he believes is the reincarnation of one of the Devonsville Inquisition witches. He has a stakes in figuring this mystery out; one of his relatives was involved in the slaying of the witches and his family has been cursed ever since, each dying by being eaten by worms…and he’s now got worms crawling out of his arms. During routine checkups, he puts the townsfolk through weird hypnotism sessions that feature him yelling at people who are put under blinking lights, and he somehow gets confessions out of them for things that happened 300 years prior.
The radiant Suzanna Love, plays the main character. She often collaborated with her husband, director Ulli Lommel, really not doing much of note outside of his productions. She co-wrote the film, along with several other Lommel movies like The Boogeyman, Brainwaves, and Strangers in Paradise. The only other recognizable actor aside from Pleasance and Love is Paul Willson, who plays Walter Gibbs. He’s probably best known now as Bob Porter from Office Space, but he’s been in a ton of guest spots on TV shows over the years, including Malcolm in the Middle, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and The Big Bang Theory.
The production is clearly low budget but does have a certain backwoods charm to it. It was filmed at Bill Rebane’s Shooting Ranch Studios in Gleason, Wisconsin. Established in the mid-1960s, this studio serviced the image, documentary and advertising film needs of national, corporate and institutional clients for over two decades while becoming the one and only full-time feature film production studio in the midwestern United States. Certain scenes, like the opening flashback scenes, are very dark, clearly just using the woods behind Shooting Ranch. Yet the ending, when we finally see some carnage, is very well done. We get an exploding head and a melting head, lingering on the latter as it dissolves for a good thirty seconds, complete with moving jaw. The one-classroom schoolhouse in Merrell, Wisconsin for the cost of an exterior paint-job.
In closing, The Devonsville Terror was a decent, slow boil witch film that actually portrays the men as the real villains. There aren’t many surprises in the story, but you will be wondering how far the chauvinists will be allowed to go before they experience their wrath.
The film was originally released on VHS in the mid-80’s and made it’s on-disc debut in 1999 as a double feature with Lommel’s film The Boogeyman by Anchor Bay. Vinegar Syndrome released this version, cleaned up with a 2K scan from the 35mm negative. While the disc doesn’t contain a commentary, they did line up interviews with several of the people involved with the production and got an archival commentary with the director, who died in 2017.
