Unseen Terror 2013: Day 13

On Halloween night, an assortment of teenagers are invited to a party at the abandoned mortuary known as Hull House by high school outcast Angela Franklin and her friend Suzanne. Things are going rather well, until the power dies, and in order to kill time, the group decide to hold a seance. They unknowingly unleash a demonic entity from the house's crematorium, which possesses Suzanne, and eventually Angela herself. Naturally, things start to slowly go wrong, and the group finds themselves slowly being picked off one by one on the night where evil is allowed to run amok with no rules.


I can always rely on the 80s to bring me out of the funk that a barrage of bad killer creature features put me in. Well, okay, Grizzly wasn't really that bad of a picture compared to what was to come, but those fishies in the coming days sure did stink to high hell. Anyhow, for something that was mostly thrashed upon release back in 1988, Kevin S. Tenney's Night of the Demons has amassed a nice cult following (and two sequels he has nothing to do with) throughout the years, and I'm happy to finally have gotten around to seeing it. This has been on my "to watch" list for the past two years, but for various reasons never quite made it on (it doesn't help that Amazon.com has the DVD sale price listing at above fifty dollars).


The opening credits automatically gives me hope with a great synthesizer theme, an animated sequence, and the words "Linnea Quigley" being flashed at me. Night's cast of characters are pretty much your typical cast of horror cliches, but they are fairly easy to identify. There's the greaser, the fat guy who looks like one of the Nasty Boys from the WWF, the Asian girl, the black guy, Linnea Quigley (easy to identify since she does love to get naked), and future pet psychic Amelia Kinkade as Angela Franklin, the demonically-possessed villain of the film, among others. Outside of being Rue McClanahan's (The Golden Girls) niece, I think it's a shame that Kinkade doesn't seem to have much else on her resume acting-wise beside these pictures. She's got a certain kooky charm that we can never have too much of this field, and her now-infamous scene of dancing to "Bauhaus-Stigmata Martyr" is so odd, yet kind of enchanting, it really makes you wonder why she indeed didn't get (or at least take) any more offers beyond these projects. This might be one of the reasons as to why I'm so hesitant to watch the remake that came about in 2009, as I just don't think I can buy Shannon Elizabeth in a role like this. As for the aforementioned Quigley, she gets just as much time as Kinkade does, and I'd argue that the film is just as much about her as it is about Angela, but subsequent sequels don't seem to believe so. As time goes by, their "conditions" seem to worsen, and they play it up rather casually, which works well in a case such as this, since possession is usually much more subtle, but in several scenes involving Quigley and her lipstick, you'll end up raising your eyebrows a bit here and there.


Now, I don't want to make this sound like a perfect film by any means, because it certainly is anything but. While the slow build towards any first sign of blood is acceptable to me (I clocked it at fifty minutes), some gorehounds might get a little frustrated and cry foul. The plot is also not the most original either, sharing a lot of similarities to Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead, but this was the 1980s, so it may seem customary for this be a common occurrence. Night of the Demons' final third also stretches itself out for quite a long time, which isn't necessarily bad, but you get the sense that writer Joe Augustyn just probably ran out of gas after a certain point and didn't want the film to be under ninety minutes, so he decided it would be best for the survivors to decide to explore and run around instead of doing anything more remotely interesting, like say, fighting. Angela's puns aren't exactly subtle either, making Freddy Krueger's look smooth. Still, as you can see from the poster above, he wasn't even invited to this party, so to that, I will quote the man from this film simply named "Stooge:"

Hey, I just needed an excuse to talk about how awesome that line was.


I believe Night of the Demons could work very well on a double bill with something like Return of the Living Dead (and not just because both films star Linnea Quigley). Both pictures have a very "rock and roll" vibe to them, as they've both been injected with songs from the punk and metal subgenres (and in the case of this film, assorted band stickers ranging from Exodus to TSOL can be seen in various scenes), don't take themselves too seriously, and are here to subtly remind you to have some fun once in a while. Plus, this picture ties in with the holiday of Halloween itself, which was a nice element that I legitimately didn't expect, but was a very pleasant surprise that only enhanced the good time. A solid recommendation.



Tomorrow, the women are still out for blood with AMERICAN MARY!