Night of the Demon (1980)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Good start, but then it gets ruined

From my favorite movies..

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This is one of those movies that you hear about from that one weird friend when you bring up your movie tastes. This is one of the more bizarre titles that I have seen. It starts out in a hospital setting and then presses on into a weird title crawl where we see the sights of the late seventies and beginning of the eighties. The music is strange, but the sights we do see our pleasant. It opens with such sweet scenes from mother nature, and then immediately were introduced to our new friend the killer Sasquatch. The only reason to really watch this movie is for the murder scenes. They are completely over the top, funny, and filled with just the right amount of nudity. The rest is just a bunch of nonsense where everyone walks around in flannel shirts, literally everybody in the woods is wearing a flannel. The pacing this movie has is also a problem, it drags on when dealing with the people and you really just want it to end and for Bigfoot to come back and murder people. The weirdest scene itself is when a man on a motorcycle comes by and just takes a leak on the side of the woods and Bigfoot comes out and rips his junk off and you see everything in all its glory. The movie tries to go for a lot of shock value, and at times it works. A rape scene is thrown in with Bigfoot and a random girl, it comes straight out of left field. This girl gets beaten senseless by her father for being impure in the eyes of God, and then she gets raped. In any other movie it would be the father getting what he deserves, but this movie just takes a dramatic turn. Bottom line, this movie is weird I tell you. From the pleasant music that just sounds completely out of place to the slow pacing and grotesque kills of Bigfoot. Its a mediocre movie at best, but if you really think its something for you, check it out.

Usually I'm a sucker for early '80s horror films which take place in the woods. THE FOREST, THE PREY, THE WARNING, I love all of them in their cheap and cheerful glory. NIGHT OF THE DEMON is another such movie, yet despite gobbets of bloody gore and gristle, the resulting story is so ineptly played out that only the most ardent horror-lovers will find themselves having a good time. Amusingly consigned to the "video nasties" list due to the graphic nature of the special effects and thereafter sought by rabid horror veterans hungry for bloodshed, NIGHT OF THE DEMON is a disappointing exercise in fear whichever way you look at it. The confused narrative is partly at fault. Packed with flashbacks every five minutes and jumping about all over the place, the non-linear style makes for tough viewing.Every couple of minutes there are shots of trees and countryside, used to pad out the footage and add a little scene-setting to the movie. Over the action we get ultra-cheap music that sounds like it should belong to THE CLANGERS rather than a fully-fledged horror movie. James Watson's direction is flawed and hopeless and the editing also poor. The script is moronic, filled with ultra-cheesy dialogue, and the hilariously straight-faced performances from the cast are also remarkably poor. The monster itself is little more than a big guy with a mask and bits of a fur rug covering his body and his "red vision" stalking shots would look better in a science fiction film rather than a horror outing.Which leaves only the aforementioned special effects for the viewer to enjoy. Despite their diabolical cheapness, the gore shots are definitely in-your-face and go out of their way to be gruesome. My favourite is the opening murder of the fisherman, whose arm is torn from its socket by the hairy horror and proceeds to spurt blood, a scene over which the credits play out. This is just about the best-filmed shot of the entire movie and promises artistry that doesn't follow. The catalogue of murders consists of a young motorcyclist getting castrated, a guy in his sleeping bag getting impaled on a branch, a pair of girl scouts getting hacked to death (in rather bad taste, it has to be said), and a young Romeo getting bloodied on the roof of his van (leading to the worst display of mugging that I have ever seen from the girl playing his lover). However, the most outrageous scenes are left for the slow-motion climax, in which one young teenager has his entrails torn out. If this wasn't enough, the Bigfoot then proceeds to whip his colleagues with the aforementioned intestinal tract! Another guy has his face burnt off on a cooker and still others are impaled on pitchforks and sadistically slashed with broken glass. More of a film to laugh at than actually be scared by, NIGHT OF THE DEMON is a cheesy and badly-made nightmare of a movie.

Aah crapness. You've got to love it. I know I do, which is why I love Night of The Demon, one of those BBFC Nasty list films that are about as nasty as a cute little puppy dog going to sleep in your arms. It is crap though, but as usual there is an area of taste after crap where a lot of these films end up. Night of the Demon isn't about a demon. It's about Bigfoot. A professor with half his face burned off tells the story from a cheap hospital bed to two doctors and a policeman. 'Begin at the beginning' prompts one of the Doctors, and this he does. Y'see for some reason that's never explained, Bigfoot likes to murder people in the daftest way possible, without provocation. The first guy we see getting murdered is doing some fishing when Bigfoot rips his arm off. The daughter of this man goes to her nearest college and the professor, along with some students, head off to uncover the secrets of Bigfoot, who, despite how many people he kills, always get's explained away as a myth. Most of the killings are told in flashback by the professor (within the flashback of him telling the story in hospital). The townies don't like the students hanging around, and it turns out that the townies are all in some sort of cult that worships the demon by offering 'Crazy Wanda' up in some sort of sexual rite that isn't fully explained. All the walking about woods and talking to townies isn't very interesting, so the professor occasionally pauses to tell a story of someone who got killed 'nearby'. A 'young girl', who looks about 40, is getting it on with her hairy-arsed boyfriend in the back of a van when Bigfoot comes along, pulls the guy out the van and proceeds to kill him on the roof before draping him over the front window, whereupon the director cuts back and forth between nude woman screaming and man bleeding all over windshield. The students camp out in the woods, electing to find Wanda, who 'might be the key to this whole thing'. Throughout this we get more flashback killings, like the biker who stops for a pish and gets lifted into the air by his genitals, or the woodsman who gets axed in the shoulder before falling to the ground in one of the least convincing deaths ever. There's a couple more, but I'll leave these to the end. So far, none of the students are killed, but we know they will die because the policeman said something about them being missing. They all eventually get to Wanda's house, way way deep into the woods. However, Wanda doesn't talk. She just screams. A lot. So they end up hypnotising her and get ANOTHER flashback as to why she is linked with the Bigfoot fella. Y'see, Wanda's dad was one of them mental religious fellas, and didn't like to see Wanda with other boys. Casting her out of the house for the night, Bigfoot wanders (geddit) out of the woods and rapes Wanda in such a cheesy way that it's only surpassed by the great death scenes I'm a-keeping for the end of this review. The product of this union is a horribly deformed baby that Wanda's father kills, pishing of both parents and getting himself barbecued for his troubles. So far, Bigfoot has been warning the students to get to feck before he really gets pished off (which makes me wonder why he killed anyone else), but the students, dumb as they are, dig up the dead baby, causing Bigfoot to go radge and waste them all in slow motion. He fries the professor's face-off and we're back in the hospital room, where the doctors think he's killed the students and commit him. This film has been very ineptly made, as if the director wanted to make a gore film but wasn't quite sure how that aspect of the film worked. Some of the editing is fine, some of the camera is fine, and yet sometimes it jumps all over the place and you can't see a thing that's going on. Strange. It's as if five different people made the film, and not one of them knew what the other person was doing. The script they have to worked with doesn't help either. One girls simply repeats everything everyone else has said and 'wants to dance'. The old prof has to say a line like 'they burned a large anthropoid effigy; and such like. Magic. The selling point for this film is that it has some of the most ludicrous death scenes you'll ever see.In one of the flashbacks two girl scouts (wearing t-shirts that say 'girl scouts' on them) get lost in the forest and wander around. Both are carrying knives for no reason. Bigfoot (whom I forgot to mention looks like he's wearing a shag-pile carpet) springs out of the woods, grabs both of them and starts bashing them together so they stab each other to death. Err...wouldn't't you drop the knife? The massacre at the end is up there in the daftness stakes too. Bigfoot pitchforks one girl, cuts a guys throat on a window, and rips one fella open then pulls his guts out and starts hitting him with them. In slow motion. I save the best for last, though. It's the highlight of the film for me, and it takes place near the start of the film. As the students bed down for the night, for some reason the film cuts away to a guy roughing it in the woods during the day. Bigfoot appears, picks him up and starts swinging him around his head. About ten times, letting him fly through the air and impale himself on a branch. The icing on the cake is that the film then cuts back to the students, and it's still night. Crapness at it's best.

An anthropology professor and his students travel to a wooded, mountainous area where a huge creature has been attacking and killing anyone he can get his hairy, over-sized hands on.The first time I saw Night of the Demon was during the dark days of the 'Video Nasty', on an nth generation bootleg tape that was fuzzier than a drunken caterpillar wearing an Angora sweater. Still, I was just thankful that the gore was intact (unlike the recent R2 DVD release, which has been cut by 1:41s, and is still crap quality), because without the splatter, this film would be about as much fun as having your Johnson ripped off by a Sasquatch (my advice: go R1 or take advantage of the wonders of modern technology to get your paws on the uncut version).A predictable script chock full of dull dialogue, crappy acting, and shoddy production values make this one hard to endure at times, but regular doses of cheesy, bargain-basement gore certainly help to relieve the boredom: the pre-credits sequence sees a man have his arm torn off; a couple in van are attacked mid-shag (a scene that nicely ticks the gratuitous nudity box in the process); a man in a sleeping bag is impaled on a broken branch; a motorcyclist stops for a pee and has his wedding tackle torn off; a woodsman is given the chop with his own axe; two knife-wielding girl scouts are made to slash each other to death; and one of the students is bashed into a tree, causing him to accidentally blast himself in the head with his shotgun. We are also treated to a touch of big-foot rape and the resultant birth of a mutated baby!This all brings us very nicely to the film's 'pièce de résistance', a brutal all-out attack by the monster in which all but one of the group are killed (the sole survivor just has his face seared on a red-hot griddle!). During this protracted wholesale slaughter, the beast throttles a girl to death, pushes one guy's neck onto a broken pane of glass, and slices another's stomach open on a saw before yanking out his guts and swinging them triumphantly through the air.All this trashy graphic violence might not be sophisticated stuff, but it sure is fun, and earns the otherwise dreadful Night of the Demon a reasonable rating of 5.5 out 10 (rounded up to 6 for IMDb).