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The Demon
[St. Clair Vision]
1979; color
Directed by Percival Rubens
Starring: Cameron Mitchell, Jennifer Holmes & Moira Winslow
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Over the course of his long career Cameron Mitchell had roles in many an obscure horror movie (check out his IMDB filmography for a veritable lexicon of forgotten fright flicks), but for my money The Demon has got to be among the strangest and most obscure of his work I've yet to see. Shot in South Africa, (which is definitely something we don't say here a lot; in fact, the only other movie I can even think of from that country that we've reviewed is Snake Dancer), Mitchell stars as an ESP-enabled retired Marine colonel who is enlisted by the local police to help track down a kidnapped girl. But, I'm getting way ahead of myself - Mitchell isn't even in the first 15 minutes of the movie. What takes place in the first 15 minutes lays the groundwork for two different storylines, bound to eventually cross because the killer is the common thread. With no explanation or backstory we're dumped into the world of "The Demon". He's a huge, menacing guy who somehow manages to appear and disappear at will. Therefore we never get the lowdown on whether he's really a human or an actual demon. I think he's human because he has an apartment and does lotsa push ups, and why would something not human need an apartment and need to stay in shape? Anyway, this character is obsessed with a pre-school teacher and, from what we're led to believe, has been for some time. One day, when he's not stalking her, he kidnaps a teenage girl for some reason. (He also appears to be some sort of an active serial killer. Again, we get no explanation as to who he is or why he's doing all this.) So… two months after the girl is kidnapped and the cops have no leads, they call in Cameron Mitchell. He has a great scene where he gets vibes from various objects in the missing girl's room, plus he gets all sweaty and freaked out when he sees the demon's image in the mirror for a second. He repeats his sweaty freakout a couple more times as he grasps an object he'd removed from the girl's room. His efforts not only eventually lead nowhere, they indirectly result in the girl's father being killed. (In all fairness, Mitchell warned him not to look for the killer but the guy just didn't listen.) In turn, Mitchell, in a completely unexpected twist, gets a bullet between the eyes and thus is absent from the final third of the film. All along, the schoolteacher is becoming the center of the killer's attention and, once he secures himself in her house and kills her cousin the movie begins to resemble another BMB favorite, Black Christmas. I really don't want to give up any more because there's a lot to take in and it's just too damn crazy to synopsize. The Demon is definitely an oddity and an obscurity well worth investigating.
—the Kommandant
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