Eddie Albert must have read my mind when he asks Tom Skerritt in one scene where they come into a ghost town, "The Devil's Rain? That's a new one." I myself had never heard of such nonsense -- maybe because as far as I know, there is no such thing and the only earthbound element that the Devil is associated with is the "fire and brimstone" of dark, Miltonesque poems and the well-known "Garden of Earthly Delights" of Hieronymous Bosch, featured in the opening titles. But this is what happens when you make a smashing success like "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Exorcist." All of the waste product tries to jump in on the bandwagon and see what profit they can make by luring unsuspecting fools into the theatre and showing them an exploitation film about Satanists -- which is all this movie is, anyway.<br /><br />So let's see what we have here. A plot to gain control of a book and a battle between the Devil himself (channeled, apparently, through the body of John Corbis) and the Preston family. First the father goes, melting into a soft bubbling goo. Then the mother -- played by an unrecognizable, tired-looking Ida Lupino -- also is forced to join the cult and put some cheap-looking eye-patches that are supposed to make her eyes black. Then it becomes William Shatner's turn, and he goes, but without a fight. Finally, it's up to Tom Skerritt and Eddie Albert to see if they can have a hand in winning this battle and going home with some really cool prizes, to which we get to the only character who does basically nothing but have a lame vision and scream mindlessly at the end: Skerritt's wife.<br /><br />A terrifically lazy story that was, apparently, written on autopilot. THE DEVIL'S RAIN is a total bore and as horror as Edgar Allan Poe is screwball comedy, but there it is, existing in the time period of the height of the horror genre, featuring a hammy performance from Ernest "Marty" Borgnine, a blink and miss appearance of John Travolta as he yells "Blasphemer! Blasphemer!" and shows off his notorious cleft chin, and the melting sequence, which goes on and on and on into the void, flanked with sounds of moaning and lots of writhing around. It could be a teeny bit redeemable if it weren't for the flat-out unbelievable final scene. Oh, bloody hell.