The Devil’s Mistress



A group of four bandits are on the run and traveling through the desert. They come upon a small cabin out in the middle of nowhere, where a man and his wife offer them food and shelter. They accept both, but before they all leave, two of them decide they want more. So the pair kill the man and assault his mute wife, before deciding to kidnap her and bring her along on their journey. But it’s not long after they start dragging her along with them that each man begins to succumb to an unfortunate fate, and the survivors begin to suspect that dragging her along with them was perhaps not the wisest idea.


I’d be pretty weirded out if my kidnap victim looked at me like that.

It’s Shorts Month here at Random Movie Musings, the month where I scour the various streaming services for whatever short films I can find to bring to your attention. This can occasionally be a crap-shoot, because most of those services don’t have a convenient “shorts” category to peruse, meaning I have to scroll through films manually, check their run-times, and hope for the best. Usually I define a short at about an hour or less, but if it’s something like The Devil’s Mistress and goes over a smidge I’ll make an exception, because you know, credits and all. That, and I was having some trouble finding much that was around 30-minutes long this year for some reason, so you get to put up with this weird little horror western instead.


We talk about only the classiest films here at Random Movie Musings…

Much like Ghosts of Hanley House, this is another extremely obscure film that I doubt many have ever heard of before. And the most I can really nail down about it’s background is that it was filmed somewhere abouts Las Cruces, New Mexico, it stars a bunch of unknowns who never worked on anything else, or only have 1 or 2 other (equally unknown) credits to their name, and that director/writer Orville Wanzer doesn’t seem to have worked on anything else again. And actually, looking at the rest of the crew, it doesn’t look like any of them worked on anything of note, either. Except for that one composer who appears to have also done work on She Freak (*shudders*), and then later some porn in the 70s. So good for that one guy, I guess, but other than him this seems to have been as low-budget and independent as it gets.



Also like Hanley House, I’d like to tell you that this 66-minute little film is some obscure gem. But sadly, it is not. And while I wouldn’t say it outright sucks, it’s…. It’s pretty rough. While I think the concept is great (Old-school, supernatural western? Sweet!), the execution leaves much to be desired. The video quality is subpar, at best. It’s grainy, it’s scratchy, the cinematography is “meh” at best, and I suspect the original film stock they used for the transfer was probably warped when they digitized it, because the screen warbles in quite a few places, almost making it look like a wave of water suddenly washed over the screen. Thank goodness those moments were brief, or else I think I might have actually started to get seasick just watching this movie.


Pop pop, fizz fizz, oh what a grainy film this is.

And the sound doesn’t really fare any better. Most of the film was dubbed, and quite poorly at that. Thankfully nothing is garbled and you can hear everything pretty easily. But the timing of the line delivery is horribly off, sometimes by a full second. Like, at one point someone throws a knife in the sand, and you don’t hear the “schwick” sound until it’s already well into the sand. So it often feels like you’re watching a shoddily dubbed foreign film, rather than something made in the American Southwest.



The acting fares a smidge better, but only barely. You can tell there’s a reason none of these people really did anything else. No one outright sucks, thankfully. But it’s all very community theater level, so no one stands out either. But you can tell that everyone was at least putting some effort in, so that’s very much appreciated.


He was truly a fabulous…uh…sleazeball?

Really, the worst thing about the film is that it’s just too damn sluggish for its own good. For something that’s only 66-minutes long, there is precious little happening in this movie. Maybe if old Orville had cut down on some of the horseback riding and shots of crows sitting in trees there might have been some more pep in its step. But there’s not. Add in a couple of dull, and boring bandits to the mix and that’s just a recipe for people staring at their watches waiting for the movie to end. Not even the nicest of scenic shots or the faster ending could make up for all of that earlier tedium.


And there were some nice landscape shots, too.

Overall, I think the nicest thing I can say about The Devil’s Mistress is that it’s a very interesting effort. It’s got a good concept and a lot of heart, but you can tell that this was a lot of peoples first efforts into film-making. Some stuff is good, but basically everything could have greatly benefited from a lot more polish. Still, it’s not all bad. If viewed from a “revenge” standpoint, the film might be lackluster. But if you view it more as some sort of dreamlike fairy-tale I think it works quite a bit better. Still, that doesn’t make up for the crappy pacing or the film’s pervasive misogynistic attitude. So if you’re interested in horror/westerns that’s something to keep in mind. I mean, I’m sure some of you out there may like it. But for the most part I think all it’s going to do is make an hour of your time feel more like hours.

The Devil’s Mistress is available on a variety of streaming services, but you may have to do some digging to find it.

The Devil’s Mistress is also available on DVD, just don’t confuse it with the 2008 series.

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