I found Night Of The Demons (1988) a lot of fun even before the demons show up. With a classic horror movie set-up – a bunch of teens decide to party on Halloween night at an abandoned crematorium called Hull House – the characters are all teen cliches archetypes dialled up to cartoonish levels. There’s the Goth, Angela (Amelia Kinkade), whose wacky idea this party is (as well as a seance to call upon the spirits who haunt this place); the Wiseguy Sal (William Gallo) with the over the top attitude; the Party Girl, Suzanne (Linnea Quigley) who only wants to dance and meet cute boys; the gross punk Stooge (Hal Havins); and the Girl Next Door dressed up as Alice In Wonderland (Cathy Podewell) with her himbo preppy boyfriend (Lance Fenton). With obnoxious banter and wacky costumes, the movie exists in the same brain-dead junk-food suburban teen hellscape as Night Of The Comet, Night Of The Creeps and even Heathers, and has a sense of fun about its descent into blood and gore similar to Return Of The Living Dead. It’s sleazy, skeezy and slimy – but there are several memorable sequences that help define Night Of The Demons as a cult classic, particularly once the evil demons that plague the house start to possess the party-goers – Angela’s strobe-lit dance by a fireplace to a Bauhaus tune or Suzanne losing her mind by painting herself with lipstick. There’s a definite Evil Dead influence with the zooming POV camera and gross-out demon faces, though it never escalates to the whacked-out level of Riami’s trilogy. Directed by Kevin Tenney and written by Joe Augustyn, this was fun Halloween viewing, the type of movie you feel like if you watched it on VHS when you were a teen, it’d be an all-time go-to favourite (despite and maybe because of its flaws). Shout Factory remastered version available on Shudder. Recommended.
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