Four Cowboys, a preacher and a beautiful girl—what could possibly go wrong? Try five murders and one rape.
The Creature Features Movie Guide (1981) slams The Devil’s Mistress as “hackneyed,” but we are inclined to disagree with John Stanley. So either the crappy 80s film we watched the night before has warped our little brains or simply alerted us what real shit looks like. Either way, we liked this twisted little cowboy tale.
Cue cowboys on a dusty desert trail and the smell of horse sweat. Two of our posse are repulsive right from the get go (Joe and Charlie), one is young and naive (Frank), and the forth—the enigmatic leader of the group (Will)—is tough and complex but seemingly a good guy deep down.
The cowboys are on the run. They come across an isolated cabin in the desert and are invited in for a meal by a preacher man (Jeroboam) and his mute wife (Athaliah/Leah).
Instantly, we know the wife is in danger from the two cowboys who have earlier made it clear they are violent and indiscriminate rapists. The enigmatic leader is suspicious of the preacher and his wife and orders his men to leave. While he and the younger one ride off, the remaining two insist on a staying for a bit of fun: they kill the fearless preacher man then rape and kidnap his wife. The cowboys then regroup.
While M wants this to be a rape-revenge film it is not so easy to classify. While the mute girl is an active party in the deaths of each of the cowboys, she is “the devil’s mistress.” It would appear, therefore, that she is acting on behalf of the devil or at the instigation of the devil. The killings are not clearly motivated by her desire for revenge, a fundamental requirement of a rape-revenge fantasy—although she does seem to enjoy her part. (Whether the preacher man is the Devil himself is also not clear. He says he left Salem with Leah "to escape religious persecution," but he reappears after he has been killed and tossed down a well.)
In fact, Leah’s rape seems to be a deliberate plan by the devil to place temptation before the two cowboys—who have been fantasising and joking about raping and killing a "squaw”—and therefore justifying his punishment of them. This is a perfectly orthodox representation of the Devil, theologically speaking, since it is his function to offer temptation to mortals to test their moral fortitude. If you fail, if the Devil succeeds in tempting you into sin, then God lets the Devil do as he pleases with you and your imortal soul. And the Devil, knowing that these two scumbags would not be able to resist an unarmed man and mute woman, despite the fact that he has just offered them hospitality by feeding them, sets the perfect trap for them. (The enigmatic leader senses the trap, and decamps for this reason.)
As for the revenge: Leah kills two of the cowboys in a particularly interesting way (the other two die by snake-bite and hanging). She seems to have the power to drain the life-energy out of her victims by kissing them anywhere on the body: lips, neck, wrists, any exposed skin. The first time we see Leah in action is when she kisses one of the men who had raped her. She seems to take great pleasure in this embrace, which is highly suspicious. When her victim is immediately affected by the embrace, then weakens and dies, we realise why she was so keen to kiss him.
Stanley describes Leah as a “female vampire” but she has no pointed teeth, she does not bite anyone, there is no blood of any description, and no fancy special effects to explain what she is doing. The draining of life-energy is very similar to the form of vampirism that appears in Lifeforce (1985), but the victims of the “space vampires” in this film (Colin Wilson’s novel—which the film is based on—is called The Space Vampires) draw sparks and ghostly spirits from the mouths of their victims, and the victims are left as withered and desicated as Egyptian mummies. Here, she kisses them, and they just weaken in her embrace.
For a simple film this works really well. The cast is tiny (only six people) and amateurs (five of them appear in no other film on imdb), and the cowboys are stereotypes, but they are wonderfully realised. And, given the way in which the four cowboys have been differentiated (morally), it remains unclear right up until the end what will be their individual fates. Also, although Joan Stapleton may be no Mathilda May (the female lead in Lifeforce) her Barbara Steele-looks are perfect for the film and the scenery is just beautiful.
The Devil’s Mistress breaks conventions of the vampire genre but sticks faithfully to Christian theology. And, although not strictly a rape-revenge film, it skates close to the real deal, offering enormous satisfaction for the female viewer despite Leah’s part as merely the agent of the devil rather than being the devil herself.
