Night of the Demons
(1988) 87 Min.
Rated: R (Nudity, sex, gore)
Director: Kevin Tenney (as Kevin S. Tenney)
Stars: Cathy Podewell, Alvin Alexis, Hal Havins
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★★☆☆
A group of teens meet up in a spooky old house to have a Halloween party.
Synopsis:
Stooge, Helen, and Roger are driving around during Halloween night. They are about to attend a party by Angela Franklin that will be held in the abandoned and supposedly haunted Hull house. Stooge angers a neighborhood old man who is carrying apples and razorblades. He hates kids and plans to slip the blades into apples.
Judy goes with her boyfriend, Jay, as well as Frannie and Max. They arrive at the house and are scared by Sal Romero who crashes the party. Angela and her friend Suzanne provide stolen alcohol and snacks. The group listens to music and gets drunk.
Soon Angela wants to gather everyone to look into a mirror and see their past lives. They stare at a large mirror, but are distracted. Helen sees a demon in the mirror and it topples over and shatters. Helen is hysterical and Roger, who doesn’t like playing with spirits decides to leave.
Suzanne suddenly inhales a demonic spirit while her lips are open to apply lipstick. She throws Angela’s car keys to Helen and Roger telling them to leave. Meanwhile, Judy, Jay, Max and Frannie decide to explore the rest of the creepy dark house.
Suzanne tells the group she has to use the bathroom and picks Stooge to accompany her. She kisses Angela, infecting her with demonic possession, before going off with Stooge. Sal and the now demonic Angela are left alone.
Jay and friends stop and start telling tales about how the house is built on soured ground. How one native american family got lost and settled there. When the native american warrior was found he had murdered, mutilated and ate his family. Directly afterwards Max decides to leave with Frannie to find a make-out spot. Jay tries to start making out with Judy, but she’s reluctant and pushes him away. He leaves her locked in a room.
Roger and Helen find that the wall circling the house seems to have no gate. Suddenly, Helen disappears when Roger’s back is turned.
Sal watches as possessed Angela does a crazy dance in front of a strobe light. Sal starts to back away when Stooge appears. He lost Suzanne after waiting for her to come out of the restroom. Stooge decides to dance with Angela. She asks him to kiss her and he does, but she bites off his lips.
Sal wanders off and finds Suzanne sitting in a corner drawing in lipstick all over her face. He decides she’s crazy and leaves her there. Suzanne unbuttons her shirt and shoves a lipstick through her nipple into her breast. Jay wanders into the room and sees Suzanne with her breasts exposed and jokes about her lipstick application. Suzanne draws close to him and unzips his pants. Jay decides to lie down and they have sex. Suzanne accuses him of looking at her and she turns demonic and gouges his eyes out with her thumbnails.
Meanwhile, Sal finds Angela in the main room sitting by the fire. She turns to him and shows him she has been warming her hands, but her hands are on fire. Sal runs away and tries to exit through the main door but it won’t open. Sal runs off in fear.
A demonic possessed Stooge finds Max and Frannie having sex in a casket. Stooge twists Frannie’s head snapping her neck and slams the door on Max’s arm, cutting it off and sealing him inside the casket.
Roger has Helen’s dead body thrown on top of the car he’s hiding in and he runs inside the house to hide. He runs into Sal and both start running away from Angela. Sal knocks down the door of the room Judy was locked in. Angela appears and the trio gets separated.
Judy ends up in the casket room and sees the severed hand of Max on the floor. The arm attacks Judy and she kicks it away. Then the possessed bodies of Max and Frannie pop up out of the casket to attack Judy. She runs away shrieking.
Judy gets frightened by Stooge and ends up on the roof of the house. She sees Roger outside and they wave at each other. Angela appears on the roof and chokes Judy. Sal, who also managed to climb on the roof, fights off Angela. He and Angela tumble off the roof and Sal gets impaled. Judy is dangling off the roof, but lands on Roger who helps to break her fall.
Judy and Roger end up back inside the house in the basement crematorium. Judy manages to loosen a gas filled pipe and uses it as a makeshift flame thrower to burn Stooge and Angela. Judy and Roger escape upstairs, but they’re cornered by possessed corpses of Sal, Jay, Helen and Angela. Roger then decides he rather die trying to jump out a window than be killed. He bursts through the window and survives. Judy follows him out.
The duo cannot find a way around the wall, so they start to climb as the demons grow closer and closer. Roger manages to get on the top of the wall, while Judy struggles. The monsters are pulling at her, but Roger helps her to get over the wall and escape.
The sun starts to rise and a giant demon head roars over smoke as the demonic creatures disappear.
Roger and Judy trudge along the sidewalk on their way home, passing the grouchy old man from earlier in the film. He goes inside and his wife serves him apple pie, which he eats. She tells him she made it from the leftover Halloween apples. His neck opens up and copious amounts of blood spills out as he dies. His wife walks over to his corpse and kisses it on the head. “Happy Halloween, Dear,” she says before sipping her coffee.
Review:
Night of the Demons is a fun 80’s film that is obviously low budget. The script isn’t anything amazing, and to be honest it has a very slow start. Thirty-two minutes will pass before the first demonic possession happens. The films first scenes are full of padding. Dancing teens, rock music and cheezy jokes litter this movie, but I don’t hate it because, well, it’s a cheesy 80’s low-budget horror. It doesn’t pretend to be anything different.
Once the teens split up things seem to get interesting and the film hits its stride. There’s enough blood and kills to amuse most horror fans. It was nice to see two of the most meek characters be the only survivors. There wasn’t much character development, but it doesn’t try to be a deep movie, either. This is a cult classic and the kind of movie to see if you’re into the fun splatter flicks of the 80’s.