This will be quick. My sweetie-wife found a film she wanted to watch during our 30-day free trial of Fandor, The Devil’s Men US Title Land of the Minotaur.  Starring Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasance this is a Greek horror film about a minotaur-worshipping cult that abducts college students willy nilly and has a young girl kill them in sacrifices to their half bull half man god. Pleasance is a local Irish priest with an accent that is never very good and often disappears entirely while Cushing is an expat Hungarian noble with a wholly English accent that is the high priest of the murderous cult.

Roger Ebert called this ‘the worst Peter Cushing Film ever,’ but we think both Shockwaves and The Uncanny can give this poorly crafted film a run for that title. I have never seen a movie directed with such a lack of spatial awareness, scenes get turned around, characters are unaware of the geography around them and there is nothing in this movie to recommend it. During the climax of the story the priest informs the young heroic man helping him that they must get there before moonrise when their friends will be sacrificed, never mind that there have been loads already without that full moon, now they have a ticking clock. The companion asks how does the priest know this? It’s a good question because absolutely nothing that happened before this clued either the character or the audience to this suddenly critical fact. The priest’s answer? “I just Know.” He might as well have said, “The writer told me!”