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Owen Gleiberman
Chief Film Critic
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Courtesy of Warner Bros. Clockwork I’m an ardent fan of Ken Russell, yet I always considered “The Devils” to be a transgressive novelty: a voluptuous exercise in extreme blasphemy and extreme horror. No doubt: It’s both those things. Yet I didn’t think it was anything more than that. (For me, that was enough.)
When the film came out, in 1971, it was at the cutting edge of a movement of extreme cinema that was rising up, like an X-rated beast, out of the swamp of the counterculture. Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” and Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” were both released in 1971. John Waters was already at work inventing punk and other filthy things — his revolutionary midnight movie “Pink Flamingos” would come out in 1972, the year that would also bring the dawn of the slasher film, with “The Last House on the Left.” At the time, these were movies that spat in the face of eveything decent and respectable. They were skeevy and violent and dangerous. Just going to see one of them could feel like an antisocial act.
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