Intensity	Stupidity:Nudity Ratio 9:9	Budget Medium

Joe Sarno has done some really good erotic and even hardcore films over the years. This is not one of them. To be fair, I am pretty sure that this is not the movie Sarno directed, but is a poorly re-edited version with no attempt made either to restore the movie to the director's original form or to even clean up the print they did find. However, even taking this into account, this is not a very good movie.

As the opening credits roll, we see some women drinking from a challis. Soon they remove the flimsy scarves they are wearing and do some sort of dance. The movie then jarringly cuts to a train speeding by. As the train stops, Helga (Maria Forsa) gets off and walks across the platform to a horse drawn carriage. She is taken to a castle where she appears to be the guest of honor. However, shortly after she arrives, Monika (Ulrike But)shows up with her girlfriend. Apparently Helga and Monika are the last of the blood line from some Countess who died over 300 years ago. A storm suddenly comes up and two more of the cast are introduced; Julia (Anke Syring) and Peter (Nico Wolf). Julia is either researching a book, has written a book or authored a paper on the subject of local witchcraft, the script seems to waiver on this point. Soon it turns out that the women at the castle are all descended from the original servants of the long-dead Countess and have kept her spirit alive all these years waiting for a chance to restore her to flesh. Apparently the time is finally right and poor Monika is soon possessed by the Countess. We then find out that Julia's long-dead ancestor betrayed the Countess and managed to get her burned at the stake but forgot to put a stake through her heart. Due to this technicality, the Countess wasn't really dead. After being thwarted by Julia's clove crosses multiple times, the Countess forces Julia to choose between Helga being impaled on the stake or taking her place. As the Countess is nibbling on Julia's neck one last time, Julia tears of chunk of wood out of the stake and rams it into the Countess' chest killing her and freeing the servants from her thrall.

So far, so good. Lots of nudity, vampires returning from the grave, and a great castle, what could go wrong. Well, for starters, Helga shows up on horse-drawn carriage. I am assuming that Sarno had Helga arrive on a train and then take the rest of the trip to the castle by horse-drawn carriage to hint that we are leaving the modern world behind. When Julia and Peter arrive they are on foot because their car broke down. The housekeeper mentions that the roads around the castle are very hard on cars. So how did Monika get there? She simply shows up with girlfriend in tow. This type of jumpy transition characterizes the whole film. None of the scenes shift smoothly. Everything is cut harshly and often jumps considerably forward in time as well. The cast assembles at the castle and then three nights later the Countess takes over Monika's body. It is nearly four nights later that the final confrontation takes place. Typically night will fall and the vampire's servants will make one attempt at getting to Julia. They will fail. Then it will be daylight and Julia and the housekeeper will exchange pithy comments. This is repeated several times. Also while there is plenty of nudity in the film, the instant a sex scene starts, we cut to something else.

Sarno's directing is uneven as well. Many of the shots are nicely framed but then there will be several lazy shots in a row where the camera is just pointed a group of people. He makes good use of motion in some of the early scenes and even uses a handheld camera with lots of camera movement during Peter's initial mental struggle with the vampire's cohorts but then this is not used again. Perhaps the most amusing thing in the entire movie is the english voice over for Julia. The first time the woman said "Wampire" I thought I was hearing things. But throughout the entire movie she continued to replace V's with W's.

The Devil's Plaything is more of a witchcraft movie than a vampire movie. The major themes all tend to follow the "witch burned at the stake comes back and takes over descendant's body to get revenge" story lines. Generally vampires don't have children. Witches are more likely to follow the female side of a blood line. Witches are more likely to be burned at the stake than vampires. And while vampires can certainly cast hypnotic trances over their victims, this is usually done one-on-one. It is witches that get naked and chant and cast spells over their victims to get them to do what they want. I suspect that the story started out as a witchcraft but there were a couple of plot points that the writer wanted (the clove cross and the stake through the heart) so they made the main villain a vampire surrounded by witch lore. I am inclined to let this slide for this movie, Sarno was less concerned with these details and more concerned with creating a suspenseful atmosphere punctuated with nudity and sex.

Also annoying was that Julia's entire line of defense against the Wampires was garlic crosses. It protected her from the chanting, from physical contact with both the vampire and her servants, and even from the demon wind although the wind did manage to rip off all her clothes. But the most annoying thing about the movie is the shoddy presentation on the DVD. The transfer was almost certainly from tape and that tape had been made from a very poor film transfer. There are specks throughout the film and frequently you can see the lint caught in the projector's gate. There is nothing to suggest that the company releasing the DVD (EI Independent) did any research into the different versions of the film out there. Perhaps that is fitting. The cheapness of the original production is mind boggling. The special effects consists of some cloth bats that have been sewn on to gloves and waved in front of the camera. The sound accompanying these bats is remarkably like someone noisily kissing the back of their hand.

The only extra on this DVD is an interview with Sarno from 2005 where he goes on and on about how great the writing was for the movie, how great the acting was, how great the lighting was, and how the sexual energy the cast portrayed was how attracted they were to each other. As I was watching the interview I was wondering if we were talking about the same movie. To be fair to Sarno, we were not talking about the same movie. Clearly the clips shown during the interview had been deleted out of the version I saw. I would love to see a copy of the movie as it left his hands and before the odd editing that it underwent to become "The Devil's Plaything". Sarno comes off poorly during the interview. He seems overly impressed with the movie and goes on and on about the sexual aspects of everything. Granted we are talking about a director who spent 30 plus years directing erotica and hardcore, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that he seems a bit obsessed about that aspect of the movie.

Addendum: Shortly after writing this review, I tracked down a copy of Vampire Ecstasy. This copy was's cropped to 4:3 aspect and was in generally better shape than Devil's Plaything, but it still suffers from the same flaws as Devil's Plaything. While the extended sex scenes add a certain prurient attraction, they really make the long drawn out pace of the movie even slower. The running time of Vampire Ecstasy is 121 minutes. The dialog is all the same but with this viewing I was even more amused when the doctor said stuff like "willigers", "wictims" and "wampires". I still don't know if this is the version that left Sarno's hands, but it can't be too much different. I am sure that during the course of filming some of the scenes went all the way to hardcore and this footage was edited to make it useable for mass distribution. Sarno was known for encouraging this. It would be easy to say that the extended scenes really killed the pace of the movie, but in truth the plot just ambles along with characters not seeming to remember what happened the day or night before and you just keep waiting for the story to go somewhere. From the first night they are there, the doctor knows she is dealing with a vampire and yet she stays there for over a week despite being attacked every evening. Sorry, Joe, mildly amusing movie with some really good looking women, but art? I think not.

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