Stooge (Hal Havins) and his friends are driving around on Halloween night when he spots an old man carrying his groceries home and moons at him out of the window; Stooge's girlfriend Helen (Allison Barron) isn't impressed by this behaviour. When the grumpy old man drops his bags after being scared by someone else, passerby Judy (Cathy Podewell) offers to help, but he sends her away with her ears ringing. Judy returns home and goes upstairs to her bedroom to change for the Halloween dance, and her boyfriend Jay (Lance Fenton) phones her up with news of a change of plan - he's headed over to the old Hull House, an abandoned funeral home where there's party being organised by Angela (Amelia Kinkade), and Judy is invited too. She agrees to go along - bad idea.
Legend has it that if Night of the Demons had stayed in cinemas in a wider release, it would have been The Most Successful Horror Movie of All Time. Something like that anyway, but really its proper home was video, and no video rental store worth its salt in the late eighties or early nineties would have been without a copy. It was written by producer Joe Augustyn, but you'll search in vain for anything resembling a great story as this is a horror at its most basic: assemble a group of overage actors to play the teenagers and subject them to a barrage of special effects.
After Judy has agreed to go along with Jay, you might expect that we jump straight into the action, and that's where you'd be wrong, because there's a lot of waiting around before Steve Johnson's rubbery effects make their presence felt. First we have to be introduced to the suckers who will be travelling up to the house, including Angela and her friend Suzanne (Linnea Quigley, already a veteran of this sort of thing), who are shoplifting; or rather, Angela is shoplifting, and Suzanne is distracting the shop assistants by showing her underwear to them. That's about the level of humour.
So we finally reach the Hull House, and are told such "this will be important later" plot points like the building has an underground river running in a circle under the perimeter wall (how you get a river to do that, I'm not entirely sure). There then follows a lot, and I mean a lot, of watching the characters stand around chatting in darkened rooms, yes, you may have been anticipating non-stop gore, but Night of the Demons doesn't deliver. After nearly half the film is over, Angela suggests a seance that will feature all of the assembled staring into a mirror they have found, but, oh dear, Helen thinks she sees something in the glass just before it shatters, signalling bad luck for the rest of the night, let alone seven years.
Some invisible entity or other, it isn't explained too thoroughly, promptly escapes from the basement and enters Suzanne, possessing her. We know when people are possessed due to the throaty voice that they employ, a voice just about everyone can do, but Suzanne doesn't act weird right away, no, that might have been too exciting. Honestly, the pacing is terrible, the whole film is incredibly slow - even the opening credits seem to last ten minutes - and you'll be watching the clock waiting for the next setpiece to arrive. When the mayhem does erupt - eyes gouged, arm torn off, lipstick disappearing into Quigley's nipple (beat that, Paul Daniels!) - it's fair enough, but the stop-start narrative isn't the way to show it off to its best advantage. Still, horror fans nostalgic for the eighties may glean enjoyment from it. Music by Dennis Michael Tenney.
Display comments