Review of Shout at the Devil

Introduction

Set in 1914 `Shout at the Devil` pairs Roger Moore and Lee Marvin as an unlikely adventuring partnership caught up in the start of the 1st World War. After personal tradegy they vow to settle the score with a local German Commander by destroying a stranded German Warship.

Filmed in 1976 this movie attempts to capture interest by including elements of comedy, romance and wartime action.

Video

The anamorphic picture is quite dreadful. Throughout it lacks sharpness with any areas of darkness completely lacking of any detail. The colours are extremely soft further adding to the lack of picture quality. Many scenes seem to have some kind of odd effect where the brightness fluctuates ever so slightly creating an annoying pulsing between light and dark.

An top of this the print contains allot of dirt and scrathes, with some sequences looking so bad that you wouldn`t be surprised if they simply picked them up from a dusty cutting room floor.

Audio

The mono soundtrack is also suitably poor lacking any clarity with the quality degrading further during the louder moments. From the picture quality alone it is painfully clear that little thought has gone into this release and the audio only makes matters worse.

There are sections of German dialogue, all badly dubbed, that don`t appear to have any subtitles whatsoever so following exactly what`s happening can be a little tricky.

Features

A trailer and some static images/text comprise the features on this disc. I would rather they hadn`t bothered and spent the time working on the quality issues.

Conclusion

Roger Moore displays his usual charm that made him many people`s favourite James Bond and Lee Marvin is on top form as the alcoholic trouble maker however the film doesn`t really work. It`s an awkward combination of different elements that simply doesn`t seem to gel.

It starts off as a light hearted adventure movie and goes well for the first half however it then attempts to introduce some romance and tragedy that takes the movie off in a totally different direction. The more emotional elements simply don`t work and seem very out of place.

I must just stress how poor the quality of this DVD is, in fact I`m struggling to think of one that`s worse. Couple that with a patchy storyline and this is one to avoid.