a routine
Spanish Fly-smuggling trip back from Mexico, two friends stumble upon an
out-of-the-way gentlemen’s club with no cover charge and plenty of sexy,
friendly ladies,” you know that your
life just got better — which is to say, irrespective of the quality of the movie
that follows, you will forevermore have, in your life, the memory of the
phrase, “During a routine Spanish Fly-smuggling trip back from Mexico…”
that movie. And yes, it’s every bit as ridiculous as you might suspect given
even that one line. What’s that? Oh, right, right… I’ve neglected to mention
the specifics of the rest of the narrative arc. A sort of low-grade rip-off of From Dusk ’Til Dawn, Devil’s Den unfolds at the same-named
strip club, which is actually a recruiting station and portal for an army of flesh-eating
undead. Backed into a corner, drug-running film geek Quinn (Devon Sawa, aka
that kid from Final Destination, and currently
a poor man’s Shane West), trigger-happy assassin Caitlin (Kelly Hu, a loooong
way from the comforts of X-Men
franchise and even The Scorpion King),
samurai demon hunter Leonard (horror icon Ken Foree, of the original Dawn of the Dead, plus Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects), and airhead
cocktail waitress Candy (Karen Maxwell) must band together and do battle with ferocious
hordes of possessed, gut-ripping strippers.
we just enjoy the spoils of that particular victory?” queries Quinn plaintively,
in making a case for not going deeper into the lair and searching out the “queen”
undead/vampire stripper). There’s also, believe it or not, a full-blown Zatoichi
fantasy sequence (!), for which I give the filmmakers mad props. Still, the
fact remains that limited means and shoddy execution absolutely murder any sort of
relative, to-scale chance this movie has; dialogue is mangled, and all action
is shot in a dirty, over-the-shoulder style that screams unplanned, seat-of-the-pants direction.
Helmer Jeff Burr is a stunt veteran who’s racked up a bunch of genre credits
(including Stepfather II), but he
brings nothing to the table here as far as skillful evocation of goosing mood.
This movie is a decent showcase for one of the most unfortunately maligned
guilds in
Stunt Ladies of
— but nothing more.
Devil’s Den comes with a 1.78:1 widescreen
transfer, enhanced for 16×9 TVs. The disc does, though, actually include a good bit of supplemental material — an audio commentary track with
Burr, a brief making-of featurette with good-natured interviews with most of
the cast (big shocker: Sawa was inked the night before shooting began) and a blooper
reel that reveals Hu to be just a little bit petulant (concerned about her lighting
and angles, but still flubbing plenty of lines). There’s also a photo gallery and a copy of
the screenplay on DVD-ROM. Too bad the product itself weren’t more worthy of the celebration. Oh well, at least we’ll always have that routine Spanish Fly-smuggling trip… D (Movie) B+ (Disc)