The Devil's Girls 4K Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		5.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		4.0
Overall		4.0

The Devil's Girls 4K Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Svet Atanasov January 3, 2024

Rolf Olsen's "The Devil's Girls" a.k.a. "Das Rasthaus der grausamen Puppen" (1967) arrives on 4K Blu-ray courtesy of Subkultur Entertainment. The supplemental features on the release include new program with actress Angelica Spiehs and producer Erich Tomek; before-and-after featurette; promotional materials; and more. In German or English, with optional English and German subtitles for the main feature. Region-Free.

It is strange to see that German director Rolf Olsen made The Devil’s Girls in 1967 because it looks like a project that was inspired by a popular American drive-in film from the 1970s. It has an original German track, but it also has a pretty good English dub track that must have been prepared for the American market because the dubbers do their best to imitate American accents. However, I could not think of a popular American drive-in film that might have inspired Olsen to shoot The Devil’s Girls. On the contrary, I was halfway through it when I began thinking that it could have been the film that inspired Jack Hill to shoot Switchblade Sisters, or possibly even Leonard Kastle to shoot The Honeymoon Killers. How bizarre is this? There are some films Roger Corman either directed or produced during the 1960s that could have provided the blueprint for The Devil’s Girls, but how many of them were screened in Germany? It seems extremely unlikely that Olsen had seen the likes of Hot Car Girl and T-Bird Gang and figured out that he could do a much better German film with a cast of European actors, most of them German.

But it gets even stranger. All of the fireworks in The Devil’s Girls take place in Glasgow and the Scottish countryside, though Olsen apparently shot virtually all of them on location in Italy. You must admit that this is pretty strange. A German director shoots a wannabe American drive-in film in Italy with European actors who play characters that are supposed to be in Scotland. To me, all of this looks and smells very, very Corman-esque. I just cannot tell what was the Corman film, or films, that convinced Olsen to imitate his craft.

On a dark and gloomy night in Glasgow, amateur thieves Betty Williams (Essy Persson) and her boyfriend Bob Fishman (Erik Schumann) fumble a smash-and-grab and while trying to get away kill a cop. Betty gets caught, but Bob successfully disappears into the thick shadows of the night. A few days later, Betty is transferred to a local prison, where she quickly befriends some very bad girls. When the right opportunity comes along, Betty kills the lesbian warden, and together with her new girlfriends breaks out of the prison. Despite being hunted by the police, the fugitives manage to exit Glasgow and hide in a second-rate inn somewhere in the countryside, where Bob has found work under an alias. However, several unexpected developments complicate the next phase of the escape and the relationships between the girls begin deteriorating.

Olsen scripted The Devil’s Girls too, but I suspect that a lot was improvised once he began shooting because there is quite a bit of chaotic material. Indeed, this is the type of material that mixes melodrama and action in that very particular manner that instantly charges a drive-in film with the proper energy, which materializes only when the actors begin improvising with the full support of the director. Nine out of ten times, this is what makes a drive-in film worth seeing.

Unfortunately, Olsen keeps The Devil’s Girls very safe and mismanages its energy. It is not difficult to speculate that this is probably how the film had to be done to get some sort of a distribution deal in Germany, but it is even easier to tell that in the hands of Corman or Hill the same material would have produced far more sleaze and graphic visuals to match perfectly its drive-in aspirations.

Olsen’s director of photography was Karl Lob, who some years earlier had worked with Fritz Lang on the vastly superior cult thriller The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. Unfortunately, Lob’s work in The Devil’s Girls is difficult to praise.

The Devil's Girls 4K Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Subkultur Entertainment's release of The Devil's Girls is a 4K Blu-ray/Blu-ray combo pack. The 4K Blu-ray and the Blu-ray discs are Region-Free.

Please note that some of the screencaptures that appear with this article are taken from the 4K Blu-ray and downscaled to 1080p. Therefore, they do not accurately reflect the quality of the 4K content on the 4K Blu-ray disc.

Screencaptures #1-24 are from the Blu-ray.
Screencaptures #29-33 are from the 4K Blu-ray.

The release introduces an exclusive new 4K restoration of The Devil's Girls. In native 4K, the 4K makeover can be viewed with Dolby Vision or HDR grades. I chose to view it with Dolby Vision and did not sample the HDR presentation. However, I did sample several areas of the 1080p presentation on the Blu-ray.

On my system, the film absolutely incredible, better than quite a few recently restored much bigger studio films. Delineation, clarity, and depth were almost always at what I consider to be 'reference levels', plus fluidity was terrific. Unsurprisingly, on a larger screen all visuals, regardless of whether they were darker or nicely lit, looked fantastic. The grayscale is wonderfully managed as well. As you can see from the screencaptures we have included with our review, darker areas boast wonderful ranges of grays and blacks without any crushing. There are no traces of problematic digital corrections. Image stability is excellent. The entire film looks immaculate, too. The 1080p presentation of the 4K makeover is outstanding. I did several comparisons, and to be honest, I think that the 1080p presentation performs almost as good or as good as the native 4K presentation. In some areas it is actually very, very difficult to correctly separate the two presentations because the quality of the visuals is equally pleasing.

The Devil's Girls 4K Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

There are three standard audio tracks on this release: German (Magnetic) DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0, German (Optical) DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0, and English DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0. Optional English and German subtitles are provided for the main feature.

I did a lot of switching between the German (Optical) track and the English track. Both feature overdubbing. However, the former gives the film a more serious identity, while the latter has a looser, drive-in quality but without any colorful words. Both are fully restored and are very healthy. I lean toward the German track because it seems better balanced to me, but I would not say that it is a superior track. I did not encounter any technical anomalies to report in our review.

The Devil's Girls 4K Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

4K BLU-RAY DISC

• Trailer One - presented here is a fully restored original international trailer for The Devil's Girls. In English. (3 min).

• Trailer Two - presented here is a fully restored original German trailer for The Devil's Girls. In German. (3 min).

BLU-RAY DISC

• Two Lives for Lisa Film - in this new program, actress Angelica Spiehs and her husband and producer Erich Tomek recall their involvement with The Devil's Girls, what it was like to work with director Rolf Olsen, the locations that were used (with interesting comments about the big prison), and Constantin Film's publicity campaign. Also, there are interesting comments about several other German projects from the same era that the two were involved with. In German, with English subtitles. (64 min)

• The Devil's Girls of Trieste - this exclusive new program visits some of the locations in Trieste, Italy, where key segments from The Devil's Girls were shot. With music. (22 min)

• Trailer One - presented here is a fully restored original international trailer for The Devil's Girls. In English. (3 min).

• Trailer Two - presented here is a fully restored original German trailer for The Devil's Girls. In German. (3 min).

• Trailer Three - restored silent and textless trailer for The Devil's Girls. (3 min).

• English Credits - restored English credits. With music. (2 min).

• English Localization - English trims with newspaper texts/other texts. Remastered. Silent. (1 min).

• Credits - silent and textless credits. (2 min).

• Promotional Materials - a collection of original promotional materials for The Devil's Girls. Silent.

• Booklet - a 20-page illustrated booklet with writings on the film by critic Stefan Jung. In German.

The Devil's Girls 4K Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Even though at the moment I cannot identify the Roger Corman film, or films, that inspired Rolf Olsen to direct The Devil's Girls, I think that Corman's influence is unmissable. I also think that The Devil's Girls is quite easy to profile as a close relative of Jack Hill's Switchblade Sisters, so these two films can make a pretty good double bill. This recent 4K Blu-ray/Blu-ray combo pack introduces a new 4K restoration of The Devil's Girls from German label Subkultur Entertainment, which should be handling much bigger projects because the quality of its work is always very impressive. RECOMMENDED.