THE DEVIL’S GARDEN (1973)

My premiere viewing of Bob Chinn’s The Devil’s Garden was one in which the unique and unfamiliar experience lent itself to the wonderfully strange film that unspooled itself in front of my very wide eyes. The only available copy to me was the original VHS that was released by Something Weird Video in the good ol’ analog days of the legendary company’s history. The transfer itself was sourced from a damaged print that not only had a lot of visible wear and tear, but also possessed a soundtrack that was almost inaudible throughout 50% of the film. On top of that, the VCR in my possession is actually a VCP, a simple, no-frills player with no remote control nor a counter display. If I miss a shot or a line of dialogue because I dare look at my phone, backing it up is such a chore that I have to REALLY consider if I NEED to check that notification I just got. Likewise, if I have to go take a comfort station break, I have to walk across the room and literally press the “stop” button like I was some kind of rat-faced commoner.

Mere seconds after the end of the Something Weird sizzle reel at the head of the tape, I was thrust into a world where neither time nor space could find any true grip. For The Devil’s Garden doesn’t adhere to any conventional rules of storytelling where I could latch onto any sense of where I was in the narrative. Nothing ever felt like it belonged to any one of the three dramatic acts audiences are generally accustomed to; it’s just a slow, fevered drift toward a sinister revelation that is anticipated with a dreaded fascination.

The Devil’s Garden features Sandy Carey doing a lot of running and even more driving. In fact, there is more driving footage this side of Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny because it was Bob Chinn’s good fortune to find Carey, already a regular in Chinn’s troupe of actors, in Jamaica in February 1973 at the AFAA conference with producer Bill Amerson. So, as he had done with John Holmes when he went to Hawaii two years earlier for Tropic of Passion, Chinn shot Carey intermingling with the locals, dashing through public places, and cruising down various thoroughfares while soaking in the natural beauty as it zipped by alongside the vehicle, all of which was to be interwoven into a movie to be written and directed later on in L.A.

In The Devil’s Garden, Carey plays Sandra Barton, wife of a filmmaker who has mysteriously disappeared into the wilds of Jamaica after traveling there to finalize a production deal with the mysterious St. Jermaine (John Paul Jones) and his shadowy associate, Chang (Bob Chinn, utilizing the Hercules Fong credit from The Danish Connection). When she arrives in Jamaica, she begins to suspect foul play as the goings-on in the St. Jermaine estate and all adjacent locations point to a nefarious malevolence which leads to a rhythmically hypnotic and steamy climax.

With The Devil’s Garden, Chinn concocted a very unusual film that has pretty recognizable parentage in films such as Rosemary’s Baby where a woman is being driven absolutely mad by a cabal of bad-faith friendlies. But set in an unfamiliar land and coasting on a wavelength that’s singularly its own, it truly does resemble the dreamy, exotic Jess Franco pictures to which The Devil’s Garden was Chinn’s slight homage. It’s such a potent mix of sex, dark voodoo, and nightmarish confusion that it causes a kind of disorientation in the viewer that works in its favor more often than it doesn’t. It literally feels like the audience is being pulled into the center of a strange vortex where, eventually, the frenzied faces of the Rastafarians are juxtaposed with the wild undulations of Deborah Maguire, creating a wildfire that’s both hot and terrifying. And its Möbius strip of a framing device is appropriately eerie and evocative of an adult’s only episode of The Twilight Zone.

The Devil’s Garden is also helped along by a great cast. As can be deduced, this was a very physical role for Sandy Carey and probably not what she expected to be doing when she packed her bags to go to Jamaica. Always casting an aura of class, Carey proved to be a game trouper when asked to run all over rough terrain and push her way through crowds as if on a frenzied, life-or-death mission (unlike Franco or Russ Meyer, Chinn spares his actress the indignity of having to do her running while stark naked). John Paul Jones’s toweringly broad reading of a perverted aristocrat is a scream and Nicolle Riddel, playing his wide-eyed sister, contributes to the deviancy of the atmosphere. Tobar Mayo is fun in his small role as an exasperated and unhelpful police chief but director Bob Chinn is even more so as Kipling Chang, an absolute no-goodnik and roofie enthusiast who, with his flamboyant wardrobe and retinue of women on his hip, looks like he’s working a side hustle in a prog-rock band.

Though Chinn shot all of the Jamaican exteriors, the actual cinematography credit goes to Michael Nitrus, a pseudonym used by Andy Romanoff who had preciously lensed Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Taste of Blood and Something Weird. The interior footage is dripping with mood and atmosphere, matching the sticky and humid setting well which culminates in its completely believable climax when stifling claustrophobia overtakes a shack that feels bereft of creature comforts. Having nothing to do with the movie itself but acting as a tremendous accoutrement that captures the feeling of the film, The Devil’s Garden sports one of the very best one-sheets Chinn ever got which is emblazoned with an epic, color-drenched painting by Rudy Escalara that still stuns to this day.

After the productions of Panama Red and The Devil’s Garden, Bob Chinn was lured back into the world of hardcore as opportunities in San Francisco were about to open the floodgates that made him one of the most in-demand filmmakers of the entire Golden Age. Had the winds of fate shifted and pushed him into a tributary that moved toward the mainstream, Chinn more than proved that he could have carved out a unique territory with his blend of formal training and his wild and imaginative spirit, something he refused to relinquish even when working in the socially impolite world of hardcore pictures.

So, even if the current presentation can’t help but be lousy and, like many of Chinn’s films, it begs for an upgrade, The Devil’s Garden is well worth the trouble you’ll spend in unearthing it and programming it during one of your more adventurous movie nights during spooky season. Believe me now when I tell you that it will play beautifully between screenings of Messiah of Evil and I Drink Your Blood. You’ll thank me later.

(C) Copyright 2023, Patrick Crain