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Night Of The Demons
[Anchor Bay]
1988; color
Directed by Kevin S. Tenney
Starring: Mimi Kinkade, Cathy Podewell & Linnea Quigley
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Some IMDB comments rank this film among the classics of the '80s but I beg to differ. I don't know if those people were watching the same Night Of The Demons I saw but this movie was just plain crappy. For starters, there are no kills in the first 50 minutes of the movie and then, once the "action" gets going, aside from some tired (not to mention typical and expected by 1987 when this film was made) gore effects, there's no palpable suspense and even fewer payoffs. It is a late '80s horror flick, however, so you do get plenty of obligatory toplessness - and even a scant bit of full frontal nudity - much of it courtesy lovely genre favorite Linnea Quigley. Sadly, even she can't resurrect this piece of garbage from it's self-imposed hell. As for the plot: a goth girl named Angela invites a handful of people to an abandoned funeral home for a Halloween party. The house where the action takes place was the site of a mass murder decades ago and had been abandoned ever since; thus, the area has always been a feared patch of ground going back hundreds of years. As a party game the kids try to do something called a "past life seance" and end up awakening a demon (who comes into the house through the crematorium) that, eventually, possesses many of them and makes each one who gets possessed try to kill those who remain. Apparently there's some of demonic caveat on Halloween that allows the demons to walk the Earth (or at least the grounds of the house in question) for one night before returning to hell at sunrise. Once we're whittled down to two kids left alive, all they've gotta do is make it 'til daybreak. (Insert yawn of predictability here, please… thank you.) Not only did director Kevin Tenney - no relation to Horror Of Party Beach writer / director Del Tenney by the way - do a lackluster job with a story that has the potential to be a great horror flick, he's also responsible for all of the original soundtrack music for the film (except for Bauhaus's "Stigmata Martyr") and thus created what's without a doubt some of the worst '80s schlock-metal I've ever suffered through. If you want to see a demon movie done right, I suggest Lamberto Bava's Demons; which makes this flick seem like Saturday morning TV fare by comparison.
—the Kommandant
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