In short: Angel of Destruction (1994)

Nudist pop singer Delilah (Jessica Mark) has acquired the attention of a rather unpleasant fan in the shape of former commando Robert Krell (Jimmy Broome). After some unpleasantness surrounding the rape and murder of his wife years ago, Krell has gone off the deep end, murdering prostitutes in mock marriage ceremonies and collecting their ring fingers.

One of these fingers Krell sends to Delilah. The singer is rather displeased by that sort of gift and hires hard-boiled private eye Brit Alwood (Charlie Spradling) to protect her from any further advances. Alas, five minutes after Brit gets on the case, Krell walks into her office and kills her. And that would be that, if not for the fact that Brit has a sister, hard-boiled undercover cop and hater of clothes covering her belly Jo (Maria Ford).

Jo does not take kindly to people walking around killing off her close relations, and decides to finish the job Brit didn't even manage to start. Protecting Delilah turns out to be quite difficult, for Krell's not the only one who wants to see the singer dead. Delilah's record label boss, the Mafioso Sonny Luso (Bob McFarland), has realized that Delilah's career has hit rock bottom (supposedly, on-stage nudity is no longer in fashion; as if the classics ever went away), and wants to cash in on her life insurance. Fortunately, Jo is experienced in all sorts of ass-kickery, even bare-breasted fighting.

You might remember Angel of Destruction's director and writer Charles Philip Moore as the (dubious) genius behind Demon Wind, a film that features so much more than gun fighting stage magicians. Angel is not quite as beholden to utter, personal madness, and instead successfully attempts to infuse the US "martial arts" direct to video action movie with as much sleazy exploitation values and bared breasts as possible. The film is also, brilliantly, a remake of Moore's own Blackbelt that replaces Don "The Dragon" Wilson with Maria Ford. That film must have been a rousing success, seeing as Angel was made a whopping two years later.

Ironically, soft core specialist Ford turns out to be a much more charismatic and professional actor than Wilson, and the only actor on screen with a line delivery that amounts to normal human speech. While being the best actress on screen in a film full of actors of truly epic inability may not sound like a great achievement, it's pretty clear that Ford (at least here) is one of those actresses in crap movies who gives her all in every form that may be required - spouting dumb yet funny action heroine one-liners, physically threatening people with twice her body mass, doing a hilariously over-enthusiastic sex scene with a living moustache, or having a bare-breasted fight scene. It's difficult to find fault with that kind of work ethos.

The rest of Angel isn't really remarkable: there's one mediocre (this is a US movie - actually a US-Filipino co-production - after all) martial arts fight, followed by a scene of people talking entertaining nonsense, followed by a scene of some actress or other shoving her silicone into the camera, followed by another martial arts scene with loads of broken furniture, and Jimmy Broome making bug eyes that would make Amrish Puri proud, and so on, until the film's finished. From time to time, the expected low production values are broken up by something especially silly, like Delilah's stage show of the prison fetish type or some excellently placed tied up manikins. It's what I like to call good, wholesome entertainment, the sort of film that makes up what it lacks in production values by providing as much as it can of the things it can afford.

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Demon Wind (1990)

(I'm going to spoil the identity of the Son of Satan here, but don't let that stop you from reading further).

The mysterious suicide of his estranged father convinces Cory (Eric Larson) that there is some nasty secret in his family's past connected to the death of his grandparents their farm burnt down years ago. Cory's damn right with this idea too, as he soon enough learns when he, his girlfriend Elaine (Francine Lapensee) and a whole bunch of his friends drive out to the ruins of the old place.

The owner of the gas station quite close to the family farm tries to warn Cory off, but when has that ever worked in a horror movie?

Once arrived at the farm, the friends stumble upon various skeletons, and witness some pretty peculiar phenomena. The farm is a burned out husk from the outside, but once someone crosses the door, it's as if there were still four walls and a roof. Much to my surprise, the TARDIS effect and a minor poltergeist attack are quite enough to convince everyone there's enough wrong with the place that it looks like a good idea to them to just leave and never return. Alas, the friends' cars are all uncooperative now, and attempts to leave the place on foot only lead into a strange mist that teleports everyone right back to where they came from.

Then three creepy children with deep voices appear and turn one of the group's girls into a doll before taking off again to wherever it is  creepy children come from. Looks like it's time to barricade the farm/not-farm up and try to weather the coming demon attacks. Fortunately, Cory's grandma was a white witch and left her spell book and two of the seven daggers made to kill the Son of Satan lying around, so there's a certain degree of hope for survival even when things start getting really strange.

Charles Philip Moore's Demon Wind might sound and look like your typical Evil Dead/Demoni-influenced spam in a cabin movie, but it beats much of the competition in its chosen sub-genre by virtue of its natural weirdness. There aren't many movies loopy enough to introduce two of their demon fodder characters by letting them drive up in a coupe while doing silly stage magic, not in an attempt to, well, introduce the characters in question as stage magicians (which would make some kind of sense) but only to forget all about it for the rest of the movie. At least the film doesn't forget one of the guys also does kung fu, so it can later take the opportunity to let him kick a demon's head off. And if you think what you've just read doesn't make any sense, you haven't seen the rest of Demon Wind.

There's also Cory's sudden magical transformation into what looks like a minor alien from Star Trek (something to do with his witch powers - I think), the re-appearance of the gas station attendant dressed up like a priest sucking in the film's other demons - because he is the Son of Satan (really not to be confused with the Marvel comics hero), a spell book shooting cartoon lightning, a human skeleton with a bull's head and a very large and hungry tongue, and a demon-possessed dying and then flashing backwards through his normal grown-up appearance, regressing into a child and then a baby until he turns into a pigeon (nope, he's not one of the stage magicians who aren't), which, as the film informs us, is the shape of his soul. In the world of what-the-fuckery, Demon Wind must be at least a prince.

Needless to say, the film also features dialogue of exquisite bizarreness ("We thought you were dead", one of the characters says to two of his demonized friends, to be confused by an answering "You can't kill what's already dead", which surely is an interesting hint - that will turn out to be quite untrue - but really isn't an answer to anything anyone's saying or doing), strained bad acting, a random pair of boobies, sudden homosexual undertones, characters acting like complete idiots, sexism of the most bizarre sort, some very late 80s fashion and hair styles and no relations to reality as it is generally understood on my planet whatsoever.

It's pretty brilliant, really, especially because Moore somehow manages to not only throw an impressive amount of really weird shit at his audience, but also does manage to achieve moments of actual creepiness in between the moments of "what the hell am I watching here?". It's the best of both worlds.

 

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