Amazon.com Customer Reviews
 Rated 2 out of 5
Fast forward review
You can tell when a sleaze film has hype by checking out the auction action, and the uncut DVD version of this is reaching 3 figures! No, it’’s not worth it, unless you’’re some kind of collector. But even a tape is a good acquisition for sex sleaze fans. There are several scenes for a compilation vid.Let’’s see, first we got one of the mean witch finders cornering a girl in a bar and sticking a needle in her bare back. No nudity, but fairly realistic. Then we got a nude in a rack with various whip marks and such, having her footsies warmed up in full detail. There’’s a female whipping, but fully clothed, and too much cutting back and forth between the girl and the ugly face of the guy doing the whipping. We got two witch burning scenes, about as good as such things get, but no nudity. Oh yeah, I forgot, one girl is cured of talking too much, but it’’s more of a gore scene if you catch my drift. That’’s it, I afraid, aside from wasted potential in the form of a nude sitting in a nail chair and being whipped, but oops . . . it’’s a guy!! Really bad call by the producers there. One star for the two burnings, one for the girl on the rack, one for the other scenes, but one star demotion for insufficient fast forward warning that you’’re checking out a male set of boo-toks. There. Want to pay full boat for two stars? Total clip length worth saving; about a minute and a half. Wouldn’’t it be interesting to make one of these movies that had no plot at all, just a lot of realistic tortures? And no focusing on the priest dude holding a feather pen in his hand yelling for confessions either, makes editing the clip a pain. Ah well, they don’’t seem to be making these sleaze movies anymore. Maybe we could talk someone into making one about Uday, you know, current events being the cover? But no Olympic team stuff, please, let’’s stick to babes, eh?  Rated 4 out of 5
there’’s more to bad had from this than you think
The first thing that catches my attention about Mark Of The Devil is the opening sequence with the Morricone-like music that graces it. What I found to be disturbing was the fairy-tale like location and the sadism that visited. The town seems like a peaceful alpine Mayberry, but its denizens will sell each other out to the worst forms of torture at the drop of a hat to save their own skins, which as the point of this movie proves, are worthless. The real horror, and I do believe this was historically true, is the helplessness of everyone in this film to stop the events of witchfinding once they are set in motion. There is nothing more terrifying than for someone else to have complete control over your life-and Lom holds a whole village in his hand, end revels in being able to pull their strings and bring out the worst qualities of the helpless villagers.
Herbert Lom is adequate as the villain; he does a good job with his character’’s ability to barely conceal his Sadean lust. Udo Kier is also interesting as the ingenue. Granted where this film does begin to spin out of control is when the director tries to imbue his hero/heroine with a freewill choice of foiling Lom. Then it’’s time to suspend your belief for the remainder of the film. The ending almost redeems the original mood. All in all a pretty worthwhile see.
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