Tuesday, August 18, 2009

In short: Night of the Demon (1980)

The sole survivor of a bigfoot related catastrophe (BRC) relates his story to some authority figures.

He and a bunch of his students went out into the deep American wilderness to find out about the fate of one girl's father. The old man was probably arm-ripped to death by bigfoot!

Of course, they get themselves stranded on some kind of wooded island (I guess) where a certain Crazy Wanda (only here: girl who was raped by a bigfoot!) rocks crazily in her rocking chair.

From time to time, the boss man of the expedition tells tales of people getting killed by the big B in one gruesome fashion or the other. The expedition has a run in with a bigfoot worshipping cult. It gets disjointed. Bigfoot attacks. Crazy Wanda flashbacks. More stories. Bigfoot kills 'em all except for one whose face he cooks. The authority figures declare our narrator to be CRIMINALLY INSANE! The End!

Oh, this obscurity is rather terrible, but in a good, entertaining way. It is obviously just someone's attempt to cash in on the dying bigfoot craze by mixing it with early "extreme" horror, yet it is so much more.

Seldom will you witness more hilarious death scenes. It's very difficult for me to decide which one is the most noteworthy. Is it the one where B throws his victim like a professional hammer thrower? The infamous penis ripping? Or is it the scene where our hero does whatever it is he does to the two girl scouts? It's a laugh a minute.

If this still sounds to classy for your tastes (and it would be for mine), just add the fantastically bad acting that just starts with "Oh my god"s delivered in the bored tone of someone asking for another piece of pizza.

Equally funny is the bigfoot costume itself. Not a looker to begin with, it seems to have lost a lot of irreplaceable hair during the shooting of the film and truly deserves the often thrown around description "ratty".

A big thank you from my side goes out to one time director James C. Wasson, without whose absurdly contrived but equally characterless direction this wouldn't be half as much fun as it is.

 

2 comments:

Kevin P. said...

I can support just about any movie that has Bigfoot swinging a small intestine above his head like a lasso and the infamous penis-ripping is in gloriously poor taste, the kind of which you almost never find outside of z-grade indie nonsense.

I really need to see this one again . . .

houseinrlyeh aka Denis said...

It just screams for a nice DVD. With audio commentary.
If even Nurse Sherri can get one of those...