Night Angel (1990)

Turns out the biblical Lilith (future German soap opera actress Isa Jank) is still working regularly. During a lunar eclipse, she incarnates on Earth, planning, apparently, to claim the soul of a man in love. After seducing, killing, and driving mad quite a few other men and women (this film is nothing if not inclusive), that is.

Lilith’s other big goal seems to be to get on the cover of fashion magazine “Siren”; to spread her evil influence, we are told. Obviously, the magazine is quickly hit by a series of mysterious deaths and hilarious, I mean horrible, sexual hysteria. Only art director Craig (the void known as Linden Ashby), his very fresh new jewellery designer girlfriend Kirstie (Debra Feuer), and taxi-driving elderly black woman Sadie (Helen Martin) – who has a past with Lilith - stand between the world and a lot of people getting their hearts ripped out during sex.

Erotic horror, as I might have said before, is difficult to realize without making it a bit ridiculous or outright hilarious. I’d wager there’s perhaps half a dozen directors working at any given time who could pull something off in the sub-genre, and hundreds of others who are at least clever enough not to try. Night Angel’s director Dominique Othenin-Girard clearly didn’t belong to either of these groups, so we get this courageous and pretty bad effort.

The film’s problems are manifold. Start with a lead actress who is certainly not unattractive but utterly lacks the very particular kind of presence as well as the acting chops needed to pull off the role of an undying demon all men and women want to screw – even if she only wants them to die for them. There’s a “sexy”, “heated” dance sequence early on that had me in stitches, a scene that completely destroys any hope of anyone watching being able to take our villainess seriously during the rest of the movie. The death scene coming right after is not much of an improvement, for that matter. It doesn’t exactly help here that the film’s idea of sexual obsession – as well as that of sex, eroticism and love as a whole -  seems exclusively schooled on the way people present arousal in softcore porn movies. Othenin-Girard’s main instruction for his actors seems to have been something along the lines of “go big!”. These are not words you say to Karen Black and Doug Jones (who are both in this thing, too), unless you’re making a comedy. On the positive side, the film is pretty funny for most of its running time, though the kind of laughter it causes is strictly on the laughing at not the laughing with side of the equation.


It’s a bit of a shame, really, for Othenin-Girard does show some promise in his treatment of the most important colours of late 80s/early 90s horror – blue and red – and certainly knows how to keep his film moving, if usually in the wrong directions. The special effects involve Howard Berger’s and Steven Johnson’s respective workshops, and are – apart from the crappy looking final version of Lilith that could have found a place in Troll 2 – up to the typical high standards of the two gentlemen. It’s just that a film doesn’t live on a couple of good effects and a bizarre nightclub in hell sequence alone.