Paul Naschy gives his most emotionally (and physically) naked performance as the horned one himself in THE DEVIL'S INCARNATE, on Blu-ray from Mondo Macabro.

"The world is so beautiful, I shall enjoy it," says Leonardo (Naschy) as he makes his way through the medieval Spanish countryside, robbing and murdering without remorse but a lot of good humor. He takes under his wing Tomas (David Rocha, THE KILLING OF THE DOLLS), young guide to a blind miser (Manuel Pereiro, SATAN'S BLOOD) who mistreats him. Sparing the blind man not so much at Tomas' entreating but because of his own good mood, Leonardo shows him that there is justice in treating hypocritical sinners as badly as they do the poor and profiting from it, taking advantage of a pious but unsatisfied miller's wife (Silvia Aguilar, THE NIGHT OF THE WEREWOLF) who offers the pair shelter and food, fleecing a usurer and his wife, sowing his seed with a rich widow after playing faith healer on her sick daughter, disguising as friars and "exorcizing" a convent of nuns whose mother superior (Blanca Estrada, THE GHOST GALLEON) believes are being molested by the devil, and robbing the clients of a brothel. When things backfire on them, Leonardo takes it in stride and moves onto the next adventure. However much Tomas enjoys his life with Leonardo, he maintains an optimism that things will not always be the way they are in the future. Leonardo downfall comes when he resorts to treachery to disabuse Tomas of that notion since Leonardo may be the devil, but he is only flesh.

Naschy's most richly-imagined yet least-formulaic genre effort, THE DEVIL'S INCARNATE – although the more direct translation of EL CAMINANTE as THE TRAVELER seems more appropriate – was regrettably not exported outside of Spain but is even more impressive a directorial effort for the writer/actor than his debut INQUISITION which was both relentless in its violence and insightful in characterization but feels more commercially compromised in comparison to his film (it is more in line with Naschy's second directorial effort THE FRENCHMAN'S GARDEN). Although the narrative has an unpredictable, free-wheeling episodic structure, the film manages to distill all of Naschy's pessimistic views on humanity as it was then and still is now ("The past was no better, nor will be the future," he tells Thomas, "because happenings are not the work of time, but of men, and men will always make the same mistakes and commit the same sins"). First seen as a panhandler who his first victim rightfully identifies as a libertine beneath his disguise, Naschy is most compelling when there is ambiguity about the true nature of his character, whether he is a highwayman who has decided that he is the devil or the devil realizing that the ways of the highwayman is the only way to live as freely as he desires. The story remains compelling but less so when there is no uncertainty that he is "his Satanic majesty", along with Naschy's too-literal vision of the future as dreamt by Tomas with the use of stock footage of German death camps. The structure references THE DECAMERON – particularly with the episode of the nuns and their visitations from the gardener – and THE CANTERBURY TALES in its bawdy humor of sex and bodily functions with the framing story of the devil who grows bored in hell and decides to follow the path of Christ and incarnate himself as a human to see just why Christ would give his life for humans. The film was photographed by Allejandro Ulloa (HORROR EXPRESS) in the diffused style of his eighties works, including Naschy's THE NIGHT OF THE WEREWOLF/THE CRAVING and HUMAN BEASTS on authentic medieval locations, some of which appear in some of Naschy's other films. Naschy's subsequent film would be more commercial and "generic" owing to the increasingly difficulty with getting Spanish genres films funded in the eighties, especially after the death of his Japanese funding partner whose collaborations netted HUMAN BEASTS and THE BEAST AND THE MAGIC SWORD, but they were no less entertaining.

Long unavailable to English-speaking audiences outside of the grey market, THE DEVIL'S INCARNATE received its first DVD release in Spain in 2009. The anamorphic transfer looked good for the time considering the diffused photography of Ulloa. Mondo Macabro reportedly rejected the existing HD master and a new 4K master was struck. Strangely, the film does not seem to gain as much from the HD uptick on their 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen encode which may have gotten a DNR pass before owners Victory Films delivered the master. While the exteriors are deliberately diffused, the opening credits lettering seems just as filtered and may have been derived from the earlier master. The rest of the film reveals some finer textures in clothing and the medieval surroundings, but only intermittently, with resolution looking far more like a projection print without the added contrast than the original camera negative and it seems like a BD50 encoding would not have done the image much better given the supplied master. The LPCM 1.0 Spanish mono audio fares better, as do the optional English subtitles.