Night of the Demons 2 (1994)

Simply A Masterpiece

One of my all time favorites.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

NOTD2 succeeds by switching from the style and tone of the original while remixing the winning formula. The original was a great mix of Return of the Living Dead and The Evil Dead while Part 2 follows "Halloween 4" quite closely: the first film's killer hunts their childlike female relative on Halloween night (right down to her wearing a clown costume). Throw in some "Lost Boys" and its not too original or expensive, but its very sincere with its premise. Unlike the first film, 2 is slower and builds the characters more and sets a more realistic tone for all of the hijinks. The climax isn't as scary or clever but it gets fairly crazy and nasty. And the whole thing is directed and acted strongly.Bonus points as "From Dusk Til Dawn" lifted more than a couple story details and images from this movie to make millions of dollars more.

I should have known what I was getting myself into watching this movie.I watched the abomination of a movie NIGHT OF THE DEMONS (1988) and already had the sequel, this "movie" in my possession. I figured it couldn't be any worse than the original.I couldn't have been more wrong. This is one of the few movies I actually had to give up on before it was even over.I got about 67 minutes into this torturous piece of garbage and had to turn it off.There is absolutely nothing frightening or even CLOSE to frightening in the portion of this that I watched. I did, however, notice many failed attempts at humor. Although most, if not all, were sexual in nature and would only be clever or funny to someone who is either an immature child or worse.I was hoping this would be more along the lines of something great, like DEMONS (1985). Not even close. I could only imagine how bad the third film in the series is.Avoid this like the plague.

Though Night Of The Demons 2 tries desperately to inject enough humor and nudity to make up for its overall tedium and incomprehensibility, this slipshod sequel is nowhere near as fun or clever as the delightfully dreadful Kevin S. Tenney Halloween celebration which spawned it.Amelia Kinkade returns as possessed party gal Angela, but this time the bulk of the action is shifted to a Catholic boarding school populated by a fresh crop of horndog teens who know all about the events in the first Night and eventually decide to throw their own party at Hull House. Of course, their visit sparks another demonic infestation, and thanks to a cameo from Linnea Quigley's lipstick tube, which one of the girls transports back to the boarding school, Angela is provided a fresh ground zero to begin converting members of the fun-loving gang into slobbering, wise-cracking unholy creatures.It takes a really long time for any of this to transpire, and nearly the entire first hour of the film is spent introducing the characters and establishing the incoherent plot. In addition to the general archetypes (jock, tramp, jerky alpha male, etc.), Night 2 incorporates a few less conventional additions to the squad of potential victims, such as a nerdy scholar whose area of fascination conveniently happens to be demonology (naturally, he's very helpful in explaining most of the ins and outs of the story to us), a timid wallflower who's revealed to be Angela's orphaned sister (and has violent dreams about her sinister sibling which provide an excuse to insert some gore into the early slow spots), and a militant karate expert nun who brandishes a yardstick as if it was a katana and swings her rosary around like a pair of nun-chucks (I wasn't intending to make a pun there, but let's run with it... a nun pun run, if you will).The film stumbles often and badly because it doesn't have any real focus, and much of what occurs during the course of the movie is sort of arbitrary and pointless. For instance, the set-up seems to leading toward the trip to Hull House, but once we get there, the totality of the excursion is basically a sex scene, a prank, and the death of exactly one ancillary character (thankfully the most annoying member of the cast bites it first). After all that build up, we end up retreating once again to the Catholic academy with the cursed cosmetic in tow, which would seem to provide an opportunity for Angela to whittle down a slew of people. However, the entirety of her visit to St. Ruth's consists of an homage to her seductive dance from the original Night, a prank, and the death of exactly one ancillary character (although we are also treated to a tasteful scene which features a serpentine phallus-beastie slithering out of the lipstick tube and crawling up between one girl's legs to nest inside of her). A couple of newly possessed minions cause a bit of mayhem in Angela's absence, but our leading lady busies herself by luring away her baby sis to either sacrifice her or convert her to the darkness, depending on which contradicting explanatory scene you choose to believe. Of course, Night's wicked antagonist wants her endgame to unfold on her own turf, so after spending two-thirds of the movie trying to figure out what the point of all of this is, we end up going BACK to Hull House, where more people die and Angela turns into a snake for no apparent reason.The special effects are nowhere near as impressive as what Steve Johnson cooked up for Night 2's predecessor, but Angela's gooey come-uppance is a suitably gnarly set-piece. Elsewhere, gags like a demon playing basketball with his own head fall resoundingly flat, and while this FX crew was able to make Angela look almost the same as she did at her previous party, if you look closely you'll notice that the two most effective shots of her in all her demonic glory are actually recycled outtakes from the first film. This installment saves most of its gore for the climax and relies instead on diversionary nudity to maintain its momentum (the presence of the gorgeous Cristi Harris certainly helps in this regard), but the extended conclusion packs in enough splatter to provide a decent pay-off for the slow road getting there.However, some of the elements at play here are so utterly stupid that they defy all reason (I'm still trying to figure out why killing a demon causes a cockroach to crawl out of its head). The most readily notable example of the concussed mindset at work here, aside from the incongruities of the plot, involves our previously mentioned kung-fu nun, who gets her head chopped up during the finale... and then promptly sprouts a new one (she explains to Angela that this is possible because of her "faith," which apparently renders her immune to decapitation).I know we're not supposed to demand too much from a micro-budget horror sequel of this caliber, but considering how effectively Kevin S. Tenney translated these same elements into a tremendously enjoyable outing, it's hard not to be disappointed by the meager results in this case. Night Of The Demons 2 isn't a complete waste of time, but only the most forgiving genre fans will glean much amusement here. I'm not saying you absolutely shouldn't see this, but I would definitely advise those who had a blast at Angela's first party to drastically lower their expectations before they send in their RSVP for this one.

Straight-to-video presentation is a lot more adept and slick than I thought it was going to be and it surprised me to see director Brian Trenchard-Smith attached. With this man on the project you could expect to see blood, sleaze and plenty of demonic make-up FX on show. And it didn't disappoint. It's virtually a retread of the original film, as it does connect back to it. Where it's a crazy, sexed-up mixture of laughs (mocking sensibility) and frights with an eccentric splash of special effects and non lighting. How it goes about things is like you're entering a haunted house ride. Go through the ups and downs, after a slow start it becomes frenetic just like the flashy camera shots and heavy on dark, Gothic atmosphere. After a group of friends are banned from the school Halloween party, they decide to hold their own in the old abandon house with an urban legend which saw a girl disappear and her body never found. The young cast (Cristi Harris, Amelia Kinkade, Robert Jayne, Rick Peters and Christine Taylor) do a good job with competent turns by all (Jennifer Rhodes is memorable), but what they do bring is energy. "Night of the Demons 2" is over-the-top and daft, but vividly fun."This is going to be the party of century."