Night of the Demons (1988)

[runningscared]

Movie: Night of the Demons (1988), directed by Kevin S. Tenney

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.26 miles, 9’04”/mile, 01:05:48 (recovery run)

 

Hands up, who here was an ’80s teen? Thinking about the first time I read Stephen King got me woolgathering about those long-lost high school years. Well, if you ever feel like watching a horror flick that’s especially representative of 1988, there’s really only one perfect choice. Take it from a guy who WAS a high school senior in that benighted year: nothing screams 1988 quite so loudly or bewilderingly as Night of the Demons. It is the distillation of 1988’s essential salts in horror movie form.

 

It’s got the big hair. It’s got the Valley Girl makeup. It’s got a Token Black Guy and a Token Asian Girl. It’s got unconvincing stunt doubles and multiple dudes crashing through windows. It’s got Dead Kennedys stickers on a battery-powered boom box and a dumb jock wearing an anarchy sign on his back for some reason. It’s got terrible off-color one-liners and cringeworthy “teen talk” dialogue. It’s got a guy with a cheesy Tony Danza Who’s the Boss? accent, which is especially hilarious whenever he says Angela’s name.

 

Speaking of Angela, it’s got a goth cheesecake dance routine to a Bauhaus song in an abandoned funeral parlor. It’s got scream queen Leanna Quigley, in what I’m pretty sure is the first role I ever saw her play, if you don’t count her uncredited appearance as one of the mannequins in Tourist Trap. And almost every girl in the movie gets at least some level of nude at some point in Night of the Demons—even the strait-laced goody-two-shoes who does charity work and prays all night. Despite that, it’s got the requisite simple-minded morality in which only the chaste might be spared.

 

It’s got a simple-minded plot, to match: ten (!) teens break into Hull House, a long-defunct funeral parlor, to have a Halloween party (read: get drunk and screw each other in coffins). Hull House, constructed on a patch of “evil land,” has stood empty ever since its last occupants all mysteriously killed each other one night, so hey, what better place to hold a seance? The teens unknowingly awaken a demonic presence in the basement (like ya do), and one by one they end up possessed and killing and maiming themselves and others in between—or during—slutty-goth choreography and uncomfortable coffin sex. Can any of them survive until dawn? That’s pretty much it, and the whole movie is the standard exercise in seeing who dies and how, but it’s more entertaining than most movies that follow the formula.

 

It’s got special effects that are actually pretty special. Night of the Demons is the sort of movie that I suspect would have relied heavily on terrible CGI had it been made ten years later, but lucky for us, in the mid-to-late-’80s practical effects were still the only viable game in town, and they’re done quite well here. In addition to competent gore, burns, and possessed-by-a-demon makeup throughout, there are a few standouts: a nicely done dismemberment; a superb shot of eyeballs bursting; and a unique and inexplicable scene with Ms. Quigley I like to refer to as “is that a lipstick in your left breast or are you just happy to see me?”

 

That last factor alone makes Night of the Demons required viewing in my book. Sure, its characterizations are paper-thin and the film relies heavily on stereotypes to differentiate between its TEN characters, but hey, ya gotta get that body count up, right? Taken as a whole, Night of the Demons is an enjoyable frolic through the psychic traumas of the late ’80s and you should absolutely watch it for a glimpse into the special blend of eleven herbs ’n’ pathologies that plagued our collective consciousness at the time. And also for naked girls. And dismemberments.