Product Details

• Actors: Malgorzata Braunek, Iga Mayr, Wiktor Sadecki, Maciej Englert, Monika Niemczyk
• Directors: Andrzej Zulawski
• Format: Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
• Language: Polish
• Subtitles: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: FACETS
• DVD Release Date: October 23, 2007
• Run Time: 119 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000UL61D4
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #73,323 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

DEVIL - DVD Movie

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Servicable release, but don't buy it., April 23, 2009

By 

M. Lucas (Oregon) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Devil (DVD)

Anyone who has an interest in Eastern European cinema probably knows the label Facets, the grin-and-bear-it, necessary-evil company that distributes most major titles of Czech and Polish classics in the US in barely tolerable (or intolerable) releases that skirt bootleg quality. They distribute DVDs for PolArt, which issues "unauthorized" releases of Polish films -- whatever that means.

The two PolArt Zulawski releases, The Devil and On the Silver Globe, are pretty much the only available releases of these films here or in the UK. It could be worse -- these are not unwatchable, and fans of the filmmaker will want to catch these films in whatever form they can get them in.

But I wouldn't buy these releases. Mondo Vision has been issuing superb editions of Zulawski films (La femme publique, and The Most Important Thing: Love is coming soon), and apparently holds the rights to almost all of the Zulawski catalogue, including these two films. I would hazard a guess that its only a matter of time before these two films get a beautiful, worthy release for about the same price as these shoddy pseudo-bootlegs.

Just hold out a little while longer, Zulawski fans.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Devil is like stepping into a world of insanity, April 19, 2008

By 

Richard J. Brzostek (New England, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Devil (DVD)

Andrzej Zulawski's The Devil (Diabel) is a portrait of insanity. It is a horror movie that not everyone will appreciate. The reason for that would mostly be due to it not being sensible. Many of the people in the film act like they are drugged out, there is a theatrical feeling to the way they talk and unquestionably many of them act insane. To say the movie is surrealistic would be an understatement. The Devil is like stepping into a world of insanity.

The story starts out with a crafty beaded man dressed in black entering an asylum run by nuns in 1793, when the Prussians took over part of Poland. He frees a political prisoner, Jakub, moments before the Prussian army goes in and murders everyone there. His liberator becomes a sort of strange guide and tries to influence his morals.

Jakub's guide is very animated and shows him various places as they travel together in the countryside. His impish guide seems all knowing. The people Jakub meets are deeply affected by the war and appear insane. The moral decay Jakub observes influences him. At the urging of his guide, he is transformed into a murderer.

Although The Devil may appear senseless at first, there is meaning in it. At first, my impression was that we are seeing insanity caused by war. But I also thought it suggests the real cause of war and insanity is sin. Of course, just as with great literature, there are many possible messages one could reveal from this film. Furthermore, there are also political comments weaved throughout the entire movie dealing with patriotism and invaders.

The Devil is unquestionably different. The fact that it is a horror, which is relatively rare in Polish cinema, makes it stand out compared to other Polish films. Perhaps the closest film to The Devil (1972) is Instability (Nienasycenie; 2003), which is also Polish. Both films have that surrealistic feeling and nearly everyone in them is crazy; both have atypical sex and nudity interspersed thought the story; both are for viewers that want something very different. I have to add that even if you didn't care for Instability that you still may enjoy the Devil because it very unique.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not as goos as Possession, but worth watching., January 16, 2010

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Devil (DVD)

Diabel (Andrzej Zulawski, 1972)

After being completely wowed by Possession, Zulawski's 1981 drama about the disintegration of the world's most dysfunctional family, I started hunting down other Zulawski works. Thus I came upon Diabel, a 1972 historical drama that has far more in common with Makavejev than it does with Eisenstein, an absurdist fantasia informed by cheapo sixties gore films and contemporary Soviet politics as much as Prussia's 1793 invasion of Poland (which would have been interchangeable with any other; as Gunter Grass has often said, Poland is the world's most-invaded nation. I'm guessing Zulawski had eighteenth-century costumes and went from there.)

The plot involves Jakub (Leszek Teleszynski, who started as a Zulawski regular), who as the film opens is a political prisoner. Just before the place he's being held is overrun by invading Prussians, he's sprung from captivity by a mysterious savior, who takes him (and a young nun who flees with them) back to his family estate in the country, where he is reunited with his sister and meets her decidedly odd fiance. Jakub was being kept prisoner because the Prussians believe he has valuable information about revolutionary conspirators (they believe, in fact, he is one); Jakub continually protests his innocence on this front, but like Kafka's Joseph K, you get the feeling there's more to the story than he's telling. For roughly the first two-thirds of the film, Jakub, in the company of his savior and his sister's beau, witnesses the effects of the complete breakdown of civilization the Prussian invasion has brought about. Once he's finally had enough of that to drive him insane, he, too, embraces a reversion to his animal nature, though as a few reviewers have noted, throughout the film Jakub is the sanest person we meet, with the possible exception of the hot young nun (played by Zulawski's then-girlfriend Malgorzata Braunek). The ending of the film is sadly predictable, though maybe I'm jaded and you won't see it coming at all.

Zulawski, in his early thirties when this movie was completed, definitely adopts an angry-young-man approach to his material here, using it as an excoriation of Soviet policy (as he did many of the films he made in Eastern Europe) as well as an exercise in pushing the envelope. Like most of Zulawski's Polish films, this one was banned in Poland for many years, surfacing only in the late eighties, because of its implicit criticism of Soviet policy (the Prussian invaders and the KGB look awfully similar) and its seemingly gratuitous violence and perversion. It's a movie that's designed to provoke, and in that sense, it doesn't work as well as Makavejev's WR, which came out the year before, but then it's also a piece with a vastly different tone to it. Makavejev was after farce, airing his criticisms through the parallel of sexual politics and humor. Zulawski wanted to open the system up and take a look at the guts through eye-gouging, incest, and shooting people in the face. Same result, but very different approaches.

Ultimately, I don't think it works as well here, though when you contrast it to later films that adopted the same approach (most notably T. F. Mous' Men Behind the Sun), Zulawski's movie, while less coherent than many of its stripe, is still riveting. As with most groundbreaking seventies films from the Polish underground, you have to be prepared for its low-budget amateur status; those who have only been exposed to Zulawski through Possession (the only of his films to have an American DVD release to this day) may find themselves surprised at how much this looks like film school work. But then, so does WR, and no one denies that movie's classic status. Worth seeing for fans of political films that are actually good, as few of them as there are, and a must-see for gorehounds. ** ½