‘So young… So bewitching… So evil!..’
The Devil’s Mistress is a 1965 American horror Western film in which a female vampire preys on unsuspecting cowboys.
Written and directed by Orville Wanzer, making his sole directorial feature. Produced by Wes Moreland who also co-stars.
The WGW Pictures production also stars Joan Stapleton, Robert Gregory, Douglas Warren, Oren Williams and Arthur Resley.
Our review:
A curious little semi-professional chamber piece, which chimes with the strange goings-on in the Westerns of Monte Hellman. It has a similarly austere, abstract quality to Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting. There are no signposts to the world at large; just a handful of characters isolated in a slowly undulating nightmare, imprisoned in a scorching desert setting.
Framed like a biblical parable – it is bracketed by blood-curdling quotations from Deuteronomy – the story follows four cowboys who encounter a displaced Puritan and his mute wife in a run-down cabin in the wilderness. Two of the men have already described their relish for carnal assault and murder – “It’s more fun if they ain’t [friendly]… Fishin’ ain’t no fun unless the fish bite” – and succumb to temptation, shooting the husband and molesting his wife. Their next mistake is to take her along, and they meet mysterious deaths along the trail. Their companions played no part in the atrocity, but are punished in the same way. What gives?
The Devil’s Mistress is not a coherent picture; that may have been the point. Questions are posed but never answered. The couple has travelled from Salem, “to escape religious persecution” – is the woman, Liah, a witch? Why does the meat they serve their ravenous houseguests taste strange? Is Liah avenging herself by causing the deaths of these men – two of whom she kisses passionately, imparting some kind of fatal malady; another is bitten by a rattler; the fourth dies by hanging – or is she the agent of a higher power: “I will send the poison of the serpent and the mouth of the beast upon them”? The ending is characteristically enigmatic.
The ambiguity nourishes, for the most part, building up the feeling of unease voiced by the cowboys’ nominal leader – “Somethin’s happenin’ to us; somethin’s in the air”. It compensates, just about, for the absence of tension, a consequence of one-time director Orville Wanzer’s (there’s a spell-check error waiting to happen) slackness on the reins. One must also excuse his point-and-shoot technique and basic compositional sense. Equally problematic are the characterisations; in the hands of inexperienced actors – perhaps even non-actors; it is difficult to tell – these are slender to the point of scraggy. Joan Stapleton, as Liah, conveys vacuity more than otherworldliness, gazing into the middle distance at a black-robed figure that follows the group, its identity coming as no surprise when it is eventually revealed.
Nevertheless, there is something here, and it comes back to the quality of ambiguity. If Hellman had made a horror western at that stage of his career, it might have played like this – albeit tighter and more accomplished all around.
Kevin Grant, MOVIES & MANIA
Other reviews:
” …it manages to make positive use of its extreme low budget; there’s something about the turgid pacing, the dearth of action, the static presentation, and the lack of music, when placed against some of the splendid western settings and in the context of a horror story that has a fair amount of subtlety and ambiguity that gives the movie a haunting feel.” Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings
“I got excited when I read the description. I love old Westerns and supernatural stories. But the camera work is the worst. It feels like a random person off the street was hired for Cinematography. Very grainy too. But it’s a B movie.” Jenny Callahan
“A strange piece of drive-in fodder yet within it are echoes of something that could have been good. This was a passion project of Orville “Bud” Wanzer, a Film Studies professor in New Mexico who cranked this out on weekends with unknowns making up the cast and crew. Despite these limitations, there is an eerie quality to it.” ★★½ Julian Blair
“It isn’t the best acted of films – but there are quite a few dialogue moments between the cowboys and these feel natural enough. Of course, the colour fading was a shame, but the muted yellowy/brown actually suited the film to some degree. It isn’t necessarily the zippiest of films, despite its short 65-minute running time, and yet there was something compelling about the film.” Taliesin Meets the Vampires
“Strange but ineffective horror-western…” TV Guide
YouTube reviews:
Release:
The Devil’s Mistress is free to watch on Plex and Tubi. Available to rent for $0.99 or buy for $2.99 via Amazon Prime
Filming locations:
Las Cruces, New Mexico
Technical specs:
1 hour 6 minutes
Audio: Mono
Aspect ratio: 1.37: 1
