Director: Robert Fuest

"Writers": James Ashton, Gabe Essoe, Gerald Hopman

And A Cast List That Truly Speaks For Itself: (from IMDB)

Take a good look at the Bosch painting they use as a background for the opening credits.  Besides helping you ignore the words “Ernest Bornine…Eddie Albert…William Shatner…John Travolta”, it will also be the last glimpse you will have of anything with artistic merit for the next hour and a half.

 The opening Hysterical Woman part is played by Ida Lupino, who kicks off the movie fretting about her husband being out there in, yes, the rain (the Devil’s rain!). You wouldn’t know it by her stereotypical role here, but Lupino was one of the first women in television who wrote & directed TV shows entirely (gasp) on her own.  Now she gets to play a shrew. Oh, and a Satanist, too. Shatner plays her son, wearing a particularly tasteless plaid shirt (the Devil's plaid shirt!) and ugly straw hat the way only he can. He’s also none too bright – it takes his Dad dying a puddle right in front of him while whispering “Satan” AND stumbling across Ernest Borgnine & Mom having a black mass in an old church before he figures out they just might be Satanists.

 A rather laid-back Tom Skerrit shows up at the Devil’s Church with Useless Female Character #2. He figures out Evil has befallen Shatner when he finds the ugly plaid shirt in front of an altar that says “Rege Satanis”. “Devil worship!” Skerrit exclaims without bothering to translate, making me think the screenwriters themselves didn’t know what “Rege Satanis” meant (“Hail Satan”. Difficult, no?).  You would think Anton LaVey, who supposedly has a brief cameo as a high priest, would have filled them in on this, since his Satanic Bible is almost certainly where they stole it.

 Lots of silliness ensues, including some crap about a magic book, a past-life witch-burning scene, and Borgnine living out many a moviegoer’s fantasy by getting to chain Shatner to a cross and hang him upside-down. Since these are the most conspicuous Satanists in history, they drag Shatner, shirtless (!!), across the desert to their Cave of Evil (why take him there to sacrifice him when they had a perfectly good spot back at the Church of Evil?) while wearing the obvious long black robes, holding flaming torches that give off an incredibly large amounts of smoke, and loudly chanting Satanic verses.  They burn an upside-down pentagram into Shatner’s chest ( if it wasn’t there already) and offer him to the Big Red One.  As everyone knows, people sacrificed to Satan lose their eyeballs and bleed white fluid when shot by a symbolically long-barreled pump shotgun.

 Eddie Albert shows up, the wind causing every hair to stand straight up off his head. Skerrit takes him to the Church of Evil, where, under the most conspicuous pentagram-shaped manhole in history, they find a kind of Satanic vase (the Devil's vase!) with a convenient viewing window that shows the collected suffering souls of the Evil Cult’s victims writhing in agony while standing in a downpour of the Devil’s Rain, the source of Borgnine’s power to control people, turn into a goat, and spout amazingly bushy eyebrows at will (the Devil's run-on sentence!).

 Shatner breaks the vase, and the Devil’s Rain comes down on the Evil Cultists. They melt in bubbling, protracted deaths that make it quite possible to locate the appearance of John Travolta’s dimpled chin disappearing into a mass of wax makeup.  I never can spot LaVey.

 Skerrit, Albert, and Useless Woman #2 escape, like anyone doubted they would. The bad old church burns to the ground.  But when Helpless Woman needs a hug, we see – the horror! – that Skerrit now sports Borgnine’s face, which means…that Borgnine has possessed Skerrit…I think. Then the credits come, and we can all laugh and love and live again.