Writer/director Andrzej Zulawski's The Devil is a message film, made in Poland in the early 1970s as an allegory about war, Communism, and using evil to fight evil — as such, it was banned and didn't see the light of day till well over a decade later. I won't even pretend to try and understand it on its deeper level; that subtext is best left to the academics and political pundits.

As a standalone movie, and the only other Zulawski flick I have seen to date aside from the tremendous Possession [1](1981), The Devil is alright. Compared with Possession, one can feel the same giddy, mad vibe and hysterical intensity from the auteur, but the end product is not nearly as polished, well-acted, nicely shot, or absorbing.

The Devil is a gruesome period curiosity about an insane young nobleman who's been set free from prison by a minion of Satan (Wojciech Pszoniak) during the Prussian army's invasion of Poland in 1793. Pawn Jacob (Leszek Teleszynski) winds up on a throat-slashing killing odyssey after he returns home only to find his father a suicide, his long-lost mother a prostitute, and his siblings raving mad. Ever-present is the demonic figure in clad in filthy black rags, egging Jacob on to greater and even more horrid atrocities. (Oh, and there's a beatific nun and meddlesome midget who keep popping up to stir up trouble as well, forming a sort of unholy trinity around Jacob.)

A zealous mess, The Devil shares some of the same shaky-cam, super-screamy Satanic vibe as some of its arty contemporaries such as Ken Russell's The Devils, Juan López Moctezuma's Mansion of Madness. It takes a good 30 to 40 minutes to really get off the ground, but if you've stuck with The Devil for that long, then you will be rewarded in the end… sort of. It's hardly an M. Night Shyamalan twist ending, but it is twisted.

The death scenes are gory, but not especially exploitative, and certainly not suspenseful — perhaps a minus in the eyes of horror fans looking for seas of blood to go along with the razor blade action, rapes, incest, resurrected corpses, and (yes) werewolves. Still, the violence is never-ending and sometimes quite shocking (the cruel killing of a galloping horse is especially chilling in not only its symbolism, but its actuality).

This Zulawski opus is worth seeing if you like any of the above-mentioned movies, but if you read the back of the DVD and bought it thinking you're in for a Hellish horror slasher, you'll find yourself in a devil's bargain.

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