Robert Fuest, the director behind such horror films as The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972) and the infamous The Devil’s Rain (1975), died yesterday. He was 84.
Fueled by the success of his two Dr Phibes films, Fuest was well on his way to a promising career as a horror director when it all became derailed by The Devil’s Rain. Filmed with an impressive cast that included William Shatner, Ernest Borgnine, Tom Skerritt, Eddie Albert and Ida Lupino and noted satanist Anton LeVey as a “technical advisor,” the film was nearly universally panned by critics. The New York Times’s Vincent Canby stated “The Devil’s Rain is ostensibly a horror film, but it barely manages to be a horror…It is as horrible as watching an egg fry.”
Although the film would later find a cult audience a decade later thanks to emergence of hoome video, Fuest would only make one more theatrical feature, the 1982 soft-core cheapie Aphrodite. Fuest played out the remainder of his short career directing a handful of made-for TV films such as Revenge Of The Stepford Wives and a couple of episodes of The New Avengers.
