Poor Devil 1973 ***

Fancy spending 73 minutes in hell with Sammy Davis Junior? That’s the resistible premise of Poor Devil, a ragged tv series pilot that resolutely failed to launch back in 1973, and has promptly been festering inside the dustiest bin of cultural history until Amazon Prime decided to feature this benighted offering as part of its 2019 line-up.

Sammy Davis Junior plays, well, himself as Sammy, the put-upon messenger boy of a big-wheel power-broker. But before you can say Frank Sinatra, it’s revealed that Sammy’s boss is Lucifer himself, played by Christopher Lee, not entirely escaping the bad-boy type-casting which he regularly cursed. Lucifer summons Sammy from his regular gig shovelling coal into the fires of hell, and offers him a fresh start by collecting the souls of wayward human beings in San Francisco, namely Quincy star Jack Klugman as Burnett J Emerson. Identified as Burny by Amazon’s permanently off-kilter subtitling, Klugman’s character is disaffected by his department store job, and seeks revenge on his boss (Batman’s Adam West). Sammy offers to utilise the collective might of San Francisco’s Church of Satan to empty the department store on Xmas Eve as a practical joke, and seeks Burny’s soul as reward for the deed.

If the above synopsis appeals to you, then please get in touch and explain why; it’s kind of like It’s A Wonderful Life but in reverse, and it makes no sense that Lucifer and his cohorts seems to be so civically minded as to want to punish selfish department store bosses. Indeed, Poor Devil feels like a feature-length ad for the wholesome ethos and deeds of the Church of Satan, with which Davis was allegedly, from some accounts, involved. Vanishing and appearing in an underwhelming special effects, Davis prowls around in hideous garb shouting ‘Right on!’ and other hip phrases, while Lee looks genuinely mortified by the depths to which he has sunk.

Awful as this film is, it’s also a fascinating picture of human desperation as a number of household names create a work of non-art that probably wasn’t even the best thing in the timeslot on the day of transmission, My on-going campaign to embarrass Amazon by capturing their half-assed and inherently disrespectful nonsense subtitling continues with the choice offering below.