Reviewed by
Christopher Armstead
Suzanne, as played by actress Bobbi Sue Luther and who is very hot, is hanging out with her BFF Maddie, as played by actress Monica Keena, who is very hot, with both women waiting for their other best friend Lily, as played by actress Diora Baird, who is very hot. They are going to be heading to the Halloween party thrown by Angela as played by actress Shannon Elizabeth who I think we all know is pretty damned hot. I mention these lovely ladies, all of them hot, all of them perhaps a bit on the mature side to be playing in a youth oriented horror movie, because this is probably the main draw of this remake of ‘Night of the Demons’. Edward Furlong is in this movie too and it is conceivable that his extreme lack of hotness completely cancels out the hotness of Diora, Shannon, Monica and Bobbie Sue. It’s conceivable.
Off they go to this party that we are informed of early on was the home of some kind of horrible event 85 years ago. The party is hopping, the drugs are snorting, the drink is flowing and folks will probably be having sex real soon… that is if Five Oh didn’t just break it all up. Damn. Now the only people left are the hotties, Fulong as Colin the drug dealer and two other dudes. These cats hang around a little bit too long and somehow got locked into the courtyard of this house. There’s a gate, but the gate won’t open. You would’ve thought they could’ve climbed over the gate but they had been drinking so that never became an option.
Now what? Wait until morning is what. They would’ve made it too but Angela found a hidden room with skeletal remains in it and thought it would cool to stick her finger in the skeleton’s mouth to steal it’s gold tooth. I’m just telling you what she did. Now Angela is demon infected and proceeds to infect everyone else. Some get infected in a pleasurable way, say like doggie style up the butt… again, I’m just telling you what’s in the movie… others get infected in less pleasurable ways such as getting their faces ripped off. Apparently if these demons can infect everybody, then they can leave this house and infect the world.
Eventually the only ones left to try to survive this night of horrors are Maddie, one of those other dudes and Colin the drug dealer. A role Furlong would reprise a year later in ‘The Green Hornet’. Type cast? Perhaps. One might think that Maddie is way too hot to be with someone who looks like Colin but she mentions that ‘He can fuck’. Note that at this point the filmmakers have introduced an image into my head that was far more horrible than anything that they tried to show me from that point on. Screaming and dying and voodoo shall ensue.
From a competency standpoint this remake of ‘Night of the Demons’ was head and shoulders superior to the original film which was… flawed… to be kind. And to that end there was really nothing wrong with this movie outside of the fact it was just so typical. It rarely made sense, characters did stupid things, but it did move and the effects were decent enough. Typical.
But here’s what I don’t like about these remakes. Sometimes these movies try to ‘fix’ these older messed up movies. In the original there was no rhyme or reason to the demon infestation. Demons are assholes. Deal with it. This one gave us this long, drawn out, convoluted reason why the demons are infesting people. To be quite honest with you I like the simpler notion of Demons just being assholes. Another alteration was back in 1988 the asshole demon demonically bricked over the gate entrance. Here the gate just got locked. Seriously, just climb over the gate. Another vote for the original. One of the things that made the original so delightfully stupid was Rodger the scared Black Guy. This movie could’ve really used a Rodger. Maybe the filmmakers were being politically correct or something but the Black Guy fleeing in abject terror every three minutes made that movie work.
But there was no Shannon Elizabeth in the original and Bobbie Sue pushed her tube of lipstick into a much nicer titty than the titty that Linea Quigley pushed her tube of lipstick into. The one thing this movie probably could’ve used to send it over was a lot more nudity. There were flashes here and there but the crew of absolutely lovely actresses that director Adam Gierasch used didn’t seem all that interested in getting naked, and understandably so because they are far beyond that in this stage in their careers. Which is why I wouldn’t have cast any of them in the first place, despite how lovely they are. I mean my man put Tiffany Shepis in this movie for a brief moment. Tiffany Shepis is hot and she gets naked like all the time. Why she didn’t get a bigger role was beyond me.
I’m just playing. Neither good nor bad this version of ‘Night of the Demons’ is simply mediocre where the original was delightfully horrible and thus more memorable. Do you want to be mediocre or do you want people to remember you? A quandary to be sure.
