May contain some spoilers:
There are films that find their way into your life almost by accident. I, perhaps like everyone reading this review ( why else would you be reading a review entitled Night of the Demon?), am a horror lover. I love them all, even the ones that have Velveeta written across the video-cassette. There are inferior horror films like Idle Hands, The Haunting and a plethora of others, but somewhere inside of me there is a place for every single horror film. My reviews may say otherwise but that will never prevent me from renting the next cheeseball 70's or 80's derelict film that boasts of a low budget, no name actors and an even less reputable director. I am always on the prowl for the next diamond in the ruff. Every once in a while you will find films like Evil Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Phantasm, Halloween and Night of the Living Dead. These films too had a cast and crew of no names involved and a budget that was so parsimonious that some of them couldn't even light a scene properly.
Night of the Demon is not a very well made film. It lacks in almost every area that is tantamount to making a film. The acting is passable at best, the direction is infinitesimal (at best) and the script is so laughable in some areas that just when you think there may be some momentum building, it is destroyed by the silly lines that come out of the actors mouths.
Characters appear and disappear for no explained or logical reason, the beast behaves irrationally and subsequently you can't believe half of the scenes that you see as being anything but haphazard and illogical. In short, this film is a mess. But there is something endearing about it. Just as Plan 9 from Outer Space has it's advocates and it's cynics, this film should probably have the same. That may be difficult because this is not a film that graces the shelves of many of your local Blockbuster shelves the way other neo-psycho/horror films do but if you can find it, you may be in for a small treat. As I have already stated, it is not a film that will have you aghast with it's brilliance, but there is a certain appeal to it. And perhaps that appeal is that you can see how the makers of the film tried to create something that made sense, they just didn't quite get it right.
Night of the Demon begins with a Professor Nugent laying in a hospital room with most of his face covered in bandages. As we hear the doctor tell us, he was found with half of his face burned off and he was in an extreme amount of pain. There is a local sheriff here, dressed in street clothes no less, (probably because they couldn't find a police uniform in the budget), and he wants to ask a sedated Professor Nugent a few questions. It seems that he and a few of his anthropology students set off for the woods in search of some Bigfoot tracks and to prove the legend of Bigfoot was real. His students never returned and he is the sole survivor of what took place in the woods.
When the professor awakes from his sedation, he talks clearly and lucidly, not like a man that has first degree burns to his entire face, including his mouth, but anyway, we can ignore this. It is quite funny but let's keep going.
The doctor then speaks up and asks the professor to " begin at the beginning." Not "start at the beginning," or "start at the top" but he actually asks him to begin at the beginning. Another funny point. So from here on out the professor tells his story in flash back style. We see the story that he is telling. His story also contains flashbacks inside of flashbacks. Included in these flashbacks are two kids that are making love in a van. They are attacked by the Bigfoot and one of them is killed. This has to be one of the most inept attempts at suspense or horror as all we get to see is some breasts, a bare ass, and then the door flies open and the young stud is ripped out of the woman and the next time we see him he has blood oozing from him as he is draped across the windshield, kind of like Gale's camera- man in Scream. Other flashbacks have a man getting his arm ripped off, two 20-something Girlguides that stab each other to death with Bigfoot's help, a man that gets his penis ripped off and few other disgusting events.
There is also more silly dialogue and situations that don't add anything to the story or the so called mysterious imbroglio that is brewing with our six adventurers. For instance, when their boat gets stolen, one of the crew remarks that " something big must have stolen the boat, like an elephant." This is the kind of brilliance that went into the painstaking effort of writing a script for this film.
The Bigfoot also has no logic to it. One minute he hunts each member of crew and begins to practice his winning by attrition technique that he must have learned in the Bigfoot school of Special Forces. All in all, this film is a mess. Yet I am still giving this film a 7 out of 10 and I would recommend that you see it.
The reasons for this are quite simple. The film may be a mess in every way but there are just times when you have to give marks for effort. I was very impressed with the gore in the film, especially since it seemed as though as the film got closer to the climax, the gore effects got more and more realistic. The very first scene where a man gets his arm ripped off looked a little egregious. But as the film prodded along, the rest of the effects were quite passable until the denouement where I was in awe at how they pulled off the killings in an original and truculent manner. If the rest of the film was filmed in a span of week, then the five minutes of violence that ensues had to of taken at least two weeks to film. Among some of the clever ideas were the excoriation of not only a man's skin but his intestines. They are then used as a weapon. A woman is shaken to death and another man is killed by landing on the jagged edge of glass. Another man lands on the blade of a saw, and as we already know Professor Nugent gets his face treated as though it were an Oscar Meyer wiener by having it placed in a boiling pot of water. Some very astute and meticulous work went into making this final scene as gory and realistic as possible.
I also have to mention Shane Dixon, the man responsible for playing the Bigfoot. As strange as this may sound, he was very effective. Shane Dixon is a legendary stunt man in Hollywood who has worked on more than 70 television and motion pictures productions. He may have a thankless job here of portraying a grunting and snarling beast that yearns for blood but he is very lissome with his movement and he plays the creature very effectively.
Night of the Demon is not one of the great horror films of our time. It is not even a decently produced film, but there is something intangibly intriguing about it. If all you yearn for is blood, guts and intestines, then this is a film for you. If you want an atmospheric and spine-tingling scarefest, then avoid this like you would a crack whore. But I think it is worth checking out. As many reviewers have noted, there is enough cheese in here to keep a rat satisfied, but underneath all that turbid and droll ineptitude, is an almost decent film that may just surprise you.
7 out of 10--Worth a look, if you can find it at your video store.
