"Alright, can I go now? I don't know what the hell's expected of me." It's remarkable how one early throwaway line of dialogue, among Richard Widmark's first in the picture, so handily describes the entirety of the feature. Sequencing, dialogue, scene writing, and the narrative as a whole are astoundingly disordered, sometimes downright rancid, and struggle to attain a baseline level of cohesiveness or coherence. The movie can't decide if its characters are incredibly knowledgeable, or blithely ignorant. The story does gradually come together, and there are some good ideas here, but it's an astoundingly rough and frankly unconvincing ride. I'm not sure that anyone involved actually knew what they were doing; it certainly doesn't seem like it. Not the cast, including Widmark, Christopher Lee, Denholm Elliott, and Natassja Kinski; not director Peter Sykes; not screenwriters Chris Wicking, John Peacock, or Gerald Vaughan-Hughes; not composer Paul Glass. From top to bottom this is sloppy, and weak, and 'To the devil a daughter' may well be a critical low point in the careers of everyone who participated in the production.
It speaks volumes about the picture that screenwriter Wicking and Hammer Films maestro Michael Carreras are apparently on record bad-mouthing it, and I'm amazed that still more participants have not publicly echoed such sentiments. For a company renowned for exquisite production design and art direction, even these elements are uneven as we see them here. Not that it would much matter even if they were reliably strong, for in every way that is of real consequence this is unfocused, scattered, flimsy, and an outright mess. Kernels of meaningful value crop up irregularly and infrequently, but are not nearly enough to counterbalance the rotten, careless "craftsmanship" that comes across in pretty much every last regard. And it's all made still worse for the fact that we know what these folks are capable of - what happened here?!
In every instance where the movie seems to have stumbled onto something good, in the next moment it demonstrates the same flailing lack of mindfulness that made such a poor impression from the very beginning. This could have been good, entertaining, a splendid slice of horror cinema. Instead, it's only godawful, floundering, empty baloney. Among this title's predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, there are many great and worthwhile genre flicks. 'To the devil a daughter' is not one of them, and by whatever means it caught your eye, you don't need to watch this. Two thumbs way down.
It speaks volumes about the picture that screenwriter Wicking and Hammer Films maestro Michael Carreras are apparently on record bad-mouthing it, and I'm amazed that still more participants have not publicly echoed such sentiments. For a company renowned for exquisite production design and art direction, even these elements are uneven as we see them here. Not that it would much matter even if they were reliably strong, for in every way that is of real consequence this is unfocused, scattered, flimsy, and an outright mess. Kernels of meaningful value crop up irregularly and infrequently, but are not nearly enough to counterbalance the rotten, careless "craftsmanship" that comes across in pretty much every last regard. And it's all made still worse for the fact that we know what these folks are capable of - what happened here?!
In every instance where the movie seems to have stumbled onto something good, in the next moment it demonstrates the same flailing lack of mindfulness that made such a poor impression from the very beginning. This could have been good, entertaining, a splendid slice of horror cinema. Instead, it's only godawful, floundering, empty baloney. Among this title's predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, there are many great and worthwhile genre flicks. 'To the devil a daughter' is not one of them, and by whatever means it caught your eye, you don't need to watch this. Two thumbs way down.