Nun Stronger: NIGHT OF THE DEMONS 2

A little while ago, I reviewed the 2009 remake of NIGHT OF THE DEMONS.  As I stated then, I ordered the blu ray thinking it was the original ‘80’s version.  I was immediately disappointed when I realized what it was.  I almost didn’t watch it because by the look of the case, it was just another cheap, crappy remake that I never knew existed.  But the scrappy little indie won me over with its heart and enthusiasm, so I gave it a pass.  It still pales to the original, I thought.  The thing is, I finally got around to rewatching the original.  Guess what?  It’s terrible.  It has its moments, good make-up effects, and a crazy performance by Linnea Quigley, but it’s so uninspired.  Kids sneak into a spooky abandoned house for a party and they start getting possessed by demons.  They run from one boring room to the next and scream a lot.  That’s about it.  Anyone who’s seen THE EVIL DEAD knows that a basic plot doesn’t have to mean a dull movie, as long as the other elements are strong enough.    NIGHT OF THE DEMONS just wasn’t strong enough.  So yes, the remake is better than the original, in my opinion.  Sorry for doubting you, remake.  You may now hold your head high.  The real surprise, however, is that the 1994 sequel I’ve been ignoring forever turned out to be better than both.

The Capsule:

A group of witless teens sneak out of their strict Catholic school for a little Halloween partying.  Most of them are harmlessly obnoxious, but Shirley has a real nasty streak.  Along with a couple of reprobate friends, she lures her school mates to Hull House, the abandoned funeral parlor rumored to be haunted.  This is especially traumatic for Mouse, because her sister Angela disappeared from Hull House years ago after a Halloween massacre.   Turns out the demonic Angela is still knocking around the old place.  When one of Shirley’s twisted pranks sends everyone running back to the school, Angela tags along.  Soon, kids are getting possessed, heads start flying, and car seats are giving phantom handjobs.  Angela kidnaps Mouse and hauls her back to Hull House to be sacrificed.  Nice girl Bibi, her rock stupid boyfriend Johnny, and demon obsessed nerd Perry, all head off to save her.  Leading the way is righteous ass kicker Sister Gloria.  She’s a rosary whipping, holy water bombing supernun.  But all the holy water in the world might not be enough to stop Angela on the (Second) Night of the Demons.

My biggest problem with the original NIGHT OF THE DEMONS was that I was stuck in a single location with a bunch of annoying characters for almost the whole time.  The good kids were whiny and useless.  The bad kids were obnoxious and also useless.  There was no one to root for.  The sequel is a huge step up.  Most of the characters are still annoying, but the things that happen to them are more entertaining.  One character in particular, though, steals the whole show.

For a School for Troubled Teens, not many teens seem to be that troubled.  Not many of them seem like teens, either, but that’s a separate matter.  Angela’s sister Mouse clearly has issues, and Shirley is a hellion, but everyone else seems like a typical over-privileged suburban kid (in their twenties).  Christine Taylor, as Shirley, is playing a prototype of her mean girl from THE CRAFT.  She can be sneering and catty, but she never takes it too far.  She's just a spoiled brat.  I like that Rick, Shirley’s douchey boyfriend, actually calls her Marcia, and this is a year before she got the part in THE BRADY BUNCH MOVIE.  Maybe this is what inspired her to go for it.  


Kurt is a typical bullying jock.  He becomes much more interesting when demonified, playing basketball with his own severed head.  Perry is the occult obsessed nerd.  He even has a copy of the Necronomicon (4^th edition, Penguin Press).  It’s funny, because he’s completely oblivious to why Father Bob disapproves of his hobby.  He doesn’t seem to get that the occult has anything to do with religion.  He’s coming at it like a science experiment.  I would be surprised if he didn’t have a survey prepared for the demons he’s trying to summon.  

Bibi is clearly established as the final girl in this equation.  She hangs out with Terri and Shirley, but disapproves whenever they pick on Mouse.  Unfortunately, she’s the second blandest character in the movie, topped only by her young Michael Biehn looking boyfriend, Johnny.  She spends most of her time moving slowly and looking scared, but she gets one decent scene, at least.  After she escapes from the sexually predatory Z Boy, who was bad enough in human form and worse as a demon, she lobs a holy water filled balloon right into his monster crotch.  She and Johnny also get to go against the sex = death trope.  They get it on in Hull House (Angela isn’t great about dusting but insists on fresh bed linens, apparently), and they are never punished for it.  I guess blandness is punishment enough.

The true hero of the movie is undeniably Sister Gloria (Jennifer Rhodes).  It’s a fantastic subversion of expectations.  Normally in a movie like this, the nun character would be a humorless sadist, going out of her way to degrade and punish.  Sister Gloria seems this way at first.  She’s very strict and prudish.  When she catches Shirley and Kurt fooling around, she bans them and innocent spectators Bibi and Johnny from the Halloween dance.  She seems like perfect demon bait.  Then, bit by bit, you get to see her playful side.  She practices fencing with her knuckle rapping yard stick.  When Shirley tries to embarrass her in class by asking a question about fellatio, Sister Gloria skillfully turns it around and makes Shirley look like the fool.  She’s the one who steps up when the demon shit hits the fan, staring down Angela and forcing her retreat.  After Angela kidnaps Mouse, Sister Gloria is the one who leads the rescue.  There’s a great sequence of her suiting up like she’s an action hero, only with a habit and rosaries instead of a head band and a bandolier of bullets.  She opens a drawer that has a set of yard sticks precisely lined up like swords.  She’s prepared for this kind of shit.

Even though the movie is partially based in a Catholic school, it plays the religion pretty light.  It’s obviously satire, but doesn’t become derogatory or sacrilegious.   I like that Sister Gloria stays true to her character even after becoming a demon ass kicker.  For her, it’s more about saving the kids than it is about destroying evil.  She is a bit corny, using lines like “save room for the Holy Ghost” when keeping the students from getting too intimate (the gag pays off nicely later).  She genuinely cares about the kids, though, and is willing to sacrifice her life if need be.  But she’s also ready with a holy water filled machine gun if opportunity arises.

The demon effects are much more creative than in the original (or remake).  There’s a talking head in the toilet (always welcome).  Demon Shirley’s boobs turn into hands to grab and burn up her lunkhead boyfriend.  Holy water makes them dissolve into green ooze and blood.  In one fantastic scene, the entire floor is covered in sloshy demon guts, flopping limbs, and Father Bob’s torso stuck in the middle.  He’s like a moving GI Joe melted down on a skillet.  They do the silly but appreciated gag where a decapitated body shuffles around spurting blood for several seconds after his head drops.  The most ambitious effects are at the end when Angela transforms into a giant snake monster.  It’s marred a bit in HD because you can see the cables that make it whip around, but it’s still an impressive visual. 

 

My biggest complaint with the NIGHT OF THE DEMONS remake was that they over explain things.  There had to be a reason behind everything, even if the reason made no sense.  The original was the opposite, it didn’t explain much of anything.  Why are there demons running around?  Because it’s Halloween, demons love Halloween.  NIGHT OF THE DEMONS 2 is nicely balanced.  It does explain a few key parts, like how Angela is able to escape the underground stream barrier that kept her in Hull House (it involves a clever, and gross, use of Linnea Quigley’s lipstick from the first film).  Other times, the movie lets you figure it out on your own, like why some demonified people can be purified by holy water while others are destroyed by it.  My explanation may be different from the filmmakers (if they even had one), but that is part of the fun.  A lot of it is left vague.  We know Angela will gain power through sacrifice, but we never know how much power or what she plans to do with it.  My money is on evilness, but who knows.  Maybe she just wants to renovate Hull House into a quaint bed and breakfast.  She clearly enjoys playing hostess.

Incidentally, I wonder how Angela and her demon pals got back into Hull House, since it was still surrounded by the underground stream.  Far be it from me to suggest a low budget horror movie sequel would have plot holes.  It must have been in a deleted scene.  

All of this is brought to us by the wonderful Brian Trenchard-Smith.  Smith was an early Ozpliotation director, unleashing insane Australian films like DEAD END DRIVE-IN, TURKEY SHOOT, and THE MAN FROM HONG KONG.  He was in his prime during the mid ‘70’s to ‘80’s.  By the ‘90’s, he was working mostly in the US and his style of gonzo filmmaking had ebbed.  I either forgot or never knew he did this one before I watched it, so it’s off-kilter and clever approach was a nice surprise.  He went on to do a couple of LEPRECHAN sequels after this, neither of which I have seen.  I should give them a shot sometime.  There might be a bit of mad Aussie magic hidden in them, too.

C Chaka

      

Stop Explaining: NIGHT OF THE DEMONS (2009)

Terrible movies were so much more fun in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s.  These days, instead of being enjoyably awful, terrible movies just tend to be boring.  They either try too hard to be clever or they lack the weirdness or obliviousness that makes even the worst movie interesting.  There are a handful of modern, entertainingly terrible movies out there, but the numbers pale in comparison to the old days.   I have a few theories as to why this is.  

One is the SCREAM curse.  SCREAM was a great movie, but heralded the grim dawn of the self-aware film.  Characters began referencing clichés in older movies that resembled their current situation, usually derisively.  A little bit here and there is fine.  Too much and it becomes a snarky put down of the referenced movie.    The characters imply that they are smarter than the ones in those dumb old movies, although they usually only wind up making different dumb mistakes.  It mostly happens in horror movies, but it can leak out into other genres as well (Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger should have been forced to do community service for their roles in THE EXPENDABLES 2).  It isn’t always that blatant.  Some movies try way too hard to be clever.  Sometimes the script just self-consciously tries to over explain why something isn’t really stupid when it clearly is.  You can’t be in the middle.  Either write a script that isn’t stupid, or own it.  

I admit, I’m biased.  I will give almost any old horror movie the benefit of the doubt.  I recently became aware of a 1984 horror movie starring Alice Cooper called MONSTER DOG.  I will likely get this on Blu Ray sight unseen, because it stars Alice Cooper and is called MONSTER DOG.  When it comes to modern indie horror, though, I can barely get through the pop up description on Netflix before moving on.  I know I should take more chances, because some of them have to be halfway decent.  Like the 2009 remake of NIGHT OF THE DEMONS, which I bought thinking it was the 1988 original.    

Capsule:

A bunch of obnoxious college kids go to a Halloween party.  Two of them are dressed like slutty cats.  One is dressed like a goth/emo boy (not sure if it’s a costume).  One is dressed like a victim from a hospital horror movie (possibly X-RAY, but I doubt it).  One might be a zombie, but looks more like she just got drunk and fell into a rose bush.  Edward Furlong also shows up dressed as the kid from TERMINATOR 2.  The party is hosted by Angela, who is dressed like a girl soon to be possessed by a demon.  For that authentic vibe that only people in horror movies care about, the party is in an abandoned, supposedly haunted New Orleans mansion.  After the cops bust up the festivities, Angela and her pals find themselves locked in the spooky old house.  They discover some decayed bodies in a hidden room in the basement and Angela is bitten by a skeleton when she tries to pull out its gold tooth.  It’s not a reanimated skeleton, just an ordinary 85 year old corpse with a snap jaw hidden in a basement, so no one freaks out or anything.  It is enough for Angela to catch demon rabies, though.  While the other kids drink and screw around, the demon curse spreads among them through traditional methods like a bite, a kiss, or – less documented – anal sex.  As the unpossessed to possessed ratio dwindles, spunky heroine Maddie and her friends fight to survive the night.  Of the demons.

This movie does not start off promisingly.  The opening prologue is done in bullshit silent movie style, complete with sepia tone and dialogue cards.  You know, to give you the feeling you are watching an authentic film from 1925, except with more decapitations.  Then it springs into the present with an equally horrible, oversaturated, quick cut Bourbon St. party montage.  There is a cheap looking CG title, worse than the simple grindhouse title cards or even the Eighties two-tone video titles.  There is a completely pointless and embarrassing cameo by Linnea Quigley (Trash from RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD deserves so much better).  Luckily, it gets all the worst shit out of the way early.  We meet our vacant young adult crew, who are knuckleheads but not as aggressively annoying as ones from an Eli Roth movie.  They all seem to like each other and there’s not a lot of bitching and backstabbing.  I wasn’t praying for their deaths, but I wasn’t broken up when they happened.  Final Girl Maddie is played by Monica Keena, who I liked in FREDDY VS JASON and is similarly likeable here.  She keeps a cool head and gets a chance to be badass later in the movie.  Ed Furlong looks way older than he should, either to be hanging out with these youngins or just in general.  Time has not been kind to him.  He does a good job of playing a loser drug dealer, though.  It’s a good mix of world weary and desperation.  I could have sworn that one of the dudes was on VERONICA MARS, but it turns out he’s just the kind of dude who you think would be on VERONICA MARS.

My favorite part of the movie is when the few possessed partiers are still trying to play it cool and seduce the normal folk.  Apparently these demons would consider the behavior in SPRING BREAKERS to be subtle, because their technique is ridiculously over the top.  Even the horny single dude is kind of disgusted.  One demon demonstrates a neat trick of making a lipstick tube disappear through her nipple and produces it from her hoochie.  Warning to parents, DO NOT hire demon magicians for your kid’s birthday party, even if they are cheap.

The biggest problem with the movie is that it will not shut up with the explanations.  There are three separate backstory exposition dumps.  I felt like I was on a New Orleans ghost tour.  At one point Maddie reads from a bunch of gibberish scrawled on a wall.  She makes the surprising discovery that the demons who have been trying to kill them are, in fact, demons.  You can skip that part, we got it.  It’s in the title, for crying out loud.  Listen movie, I don’t need your cockamamie hypothesis on why rust hurts demons.  No one is wondering that.  “For some reason” is perfectly fine.  Any reason we the audience cook up probably makes more sense, anyway.  

The movie is at its best when it loosens up and just rolls with the insanity.  One of the characters suddenly falls through not one but three floors for no discernible reason.  Maddie shoves iron nails down the barrel of a shotgun and fires them like she was Elmer Fudd.  Everyone is trapped on the deadly property because the outer gate is locked.  It’s not an electrified gate or covered in snakes or anything, just a regular gate.  Yet no one even suggests climbing over it.  Maybe their costumes were rentals and they didn’t want to risk tearing them.  I even like the little moments of stupidity, like how the bathroom is always vacant during a party with a hundred drunken revelers.  Or how Angela charges for admission, but has spent at least twenty times the total cover on an open bar and ridiculous lighting and sound systems.  Or why Furlong’s scary New Orleans drug connection is British.  

One not so great weird thing is the way they criminally underused the N.O. setting.  They have one (terrible) establishing shot of Bourbon St. in the beginning, then it’s all sound stages.  Due to the drabness, I actually suspected it was filmed in Bulgaria, like every DTV action movie made in the last fifteen years.  I was surprised to find it really was filmed entirely in New Orleans.  

They do a much better job with the soundtrack, including an exceptional use of Concrete Blonde’s “Vampire Song”.  I’m surprised they didn’t find a way to point out the movie is about demons, not vampires, though.  Just in case we were confused.  The theme song is by 45 Grave, of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD fame.  It’s no “Party Time”, but it’s a nice touch.  I didn’t recognize any of the other music, but the soundtrack has a handpicked quality and works thematically.  Plus, one of the bands is named Goatwhore.  I approve.

The make-up work is justifiably the highlight of the movie.  There is some CG enhanced (?) shots, but most of it is practical.   The opening decapitation is nice and blood spurty, even if it is in sepia tone.  There is a bathtub of blood, which I always appreciate.  The demons in particular are well done, with a lot of weird and asymmetric touches.   Someone gets her face ripped off and her demon form remains faceless.  There are boob tentacles.  Any movie with boob tentacles is worth your time.

So despite its self-conscious self-awareness, I found the movie charming.  It has a lot of heart.  You can tell director Adam Gierasch is really into ‘80’s horror and wanted to give it that fun feel.  There’s nothing mean spirited about it, just gory and goofy without becoming a parody.   Not a bad job.  I haven’t seen (or recognized) any of Gierasch’s other movies.  I’m not sure I’m going to actively seek them out, but if I flip by them on Netflix one weekend, maybe I’ll give it a shot.  Hopefully he’s learned to loosen up and embrace the stupidity. 

C Chaka