Pat Higgins: Director
Review: The Devil's Music
Thursday, January 01, 2015
The Devil's Music
Director: Pat Higgins
Release: 2008
Popular culture, especially film and music, is at the center of this dance.
The forms, names, and eras are familiar from late 20th century examples: Marilyn Manson in the wake of Columbine in the United States; nine killings around the world linked to Wes Craven's "Scream;" director Robert Altman telling the world that violent Hollywood blockbusters showed terrorists "how to do it" when it came to 9/11.
By dint of its accessibility or its immediately comprehensible signifiers, the movie in the dark and the singer on the stage have dominated this back-and-forth over the possible societal impact of images and ideas as conveyed through story or song.
What if, posits director/writer Pat Higgins, in this dance, there were even more profound stakes than culture, sensibility, and the general progress of art and free will?
Told as a documentary, Higgins' "The Devil's Music" is a voyeuristic exploration of the rise, demise, and occultation of a dark rock star named Erika Spawn (Victoria Hopkins), whose bloody and sexual stage act attracts hordes of fans, and one particularly disastrous groupie.
The groupie, Stef Regan (Lucy Dunn), brings with her a murky and sinister history in connection to Erika's opposite number - sacred rock star Robin Harris (Scott Thomas).
Regan won't speak of that history, or much of Robin, to anyone. The band unwittingly adopts her, and her presence gradually overpowers everything Erika Spawn was about.
Relations strain: Already ornery bassist Adele Black (one of the films strongest performances by Jess-Luisa Flynn) becomes less and less thrilled with her musical outfit.
Opportunities are lost: The band fails to win expected awards.
And when the band's drummer creeps into Stef's room to tape her nocturnal ramblings, he captures something that puts him off prank playing for good.
Finally, the sense that all is not what is seems culminates in a double tragedy: A stabbing that puts Regan in a mental institution and a nightclub shooting linked to Erika Spawn by the shooters - two deranged fans.
Robin Harris strikes. Through the All Our Futures campaign he attempts to bring England together against the unsavory content of its popular culture. His pariah: Erika Spawn.
Likewise, Erika is obsessed with her opponent, and comes to possess certain occult knowledge regarding the ultra-clean entertainer.
It's a brilliant premise, drawing on great traditions within the genre and without. Think of it as a kind of breathless VH1 marriage of "This is Spinal Tap" and "The Omen."
Higgins directly interrogates the rules audiences allow censors to generate.
As the grandfatherly scolding of media critic/activist Melvin True (Geoffrey Sleight with a proper dose of self-righteousness) perforates Erika and company's public image with spiritual and societal warnings, Robin's elaborate trap plays out as really no different than any well-executed politics. He and Melvin spin events to their favor, and perhaps perpetrate events to perpetuate that upper hand.
The parallels between Higgins fantasy world and the use of news and well-timed speeches to destroy a candidate or any public figure are clever and relevant.
Higgins also gleefully employs some of the narrative trappings of the film's source 1970s occult cousins, including the slightly diffident keeper of arcane lore character, who helps Erika pore over 15th century paintings and symbols containing clues about what Robin Harris really represents.
All this could become critically hokey in a post-"DaVinci's Code" world, but Higgins' faux-documentary construct preserves all the back-office occultism from tired formula.
Audiences glean plot from interviews, rather than puffy expository dialogue.
Higgins wisely keeps the scary payoff to all this gradually mounting doom in the margins of the camera. Rather than devolving into a rubber-suited monster or computer-generated light show, "The Devil's Music" uses its cinema-verite simulation to great advantage.
When something awful happens, the audience in fact strains to see it. The worst of "The Devil's Music" happens at a distance, or just off lens. In a lesson learned from predecessors like "The Blair Witch Project," Higgins' actors - not equipment in the post-production studio - deliver the scares.
Regarding performances, Higgins' indie low budget films are populated by earnest, if not always perfect specimens.
"The Devil's Music" never suffers from a cast that seems not to care, but there are some stretches that show the seams.
The stage performances by the otherwise excellent Hopkins reveal that Higgins simply did not cast a rock star in the role of Erika.
Since the whole construct relies on performances and there's very little in the way of lights, special effects or enhancement to hide what Hopkins does on stage, the actress' painfully self-conscious on stage moments become a hurdle for the film.
Audiences must believe in Erika's dark-goddess charisma to sell the Spawn-Harris polarity, and it's just not there. Her songs and stagecraft never achieve the level of shocking the story demands, and so "The Devil's Music" teeters on the brink of disaster.
It is the interviews that save it, and oddly the stills. A single photograph of Erika in a goat-head mask convinces the viewer of her severity more effectively than minutes of Hopkins' herky-jerky fronting of the band. The film would have been better served by more of the implication and less of the exhibition.
There will come a time, perhaps, when Higgins works in a larger arena, on these already very large concepts. When he has all the right tools to do the job, free of major constraints, a film like "The Devil's Music" could be a breakout entry.
In this case, the director's transcends its difficulties. Higgins' narrative and theme, match, pitch-perfect. The sum of "The Devil's Music," like an album, is greater than its parts.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
The Devil's Music, 2008
It is the interviews that save it, and oddly the stills. A single photograph of Erika in a goat-head mask convinces the viewer of her severity more effectively than minutes of Hopkins' herky-jerky fronting of the band. The film would have been better served by more of the implication and less of the exhibition.
