Night of the Demons (a.k.a when misplaced nostalgia goes wrong)

Past perhaps my taste in music, I don’t consider myself a particularly nostalgic person. I never gave into that trend some years ago where people my age (usually younger) were sporting t-shirts of 80s cartoon characters. Would I wear an Ghostbusters t-shirt if I could find one in my size? Hell yes, but only because it remains one of my favorite movies, not just because I loved the movie when I was 4.

Trying now to get back into blogging, I wanted to write about a horror series. After hearing a podcast wherein the hosts watched every single Friday the 13th movie ever, I thought of tackling that series too, although it would probably be from the perspective from someone who has never really liked the series all that much. Instead of that, I decided to cover a smaller series that I never read much about and kind of wanted to revisit, Night of the Demons. Downside? I can only get the first two movies from Netflix. I have no clue where I could get the third film.

I was first introduced to the Night of the Demons series when I was a teenager. The movies were usually on cable, late night HBO or Cinemax. I’m pretty sure I saw the films completely out of order, but I liked them in all their fairly sleazy glory. To add to the backstory, I also saw all the films anywhere between 1-3 years before I saw the first and second Evil Dead movies (Army of Darkness was occasionally on the Sci-Fi Channel though) – copies were hard to come by in the area I lived in.

It is because I did not see the first two Evil Dead films until I was 18 that I probably liked the Night of the Demons series way more than I should have back then. While I am not getting the second film in until tomorrow, I watched the first over the weekend. My reaction was not pretty. I basically downed two rum and cokes within the space of an hour. It is because of that that it’s hard for me to say whether Night of the Demons is a film that wears its influences on it’s sleeve or if it’s outright ripping off Evil Dead with a dash of Romeroism thrown in towards the end (both outwardly when a character is suddenly revealed to have the last name of “Romero”, as well as who lives).

The plot is that a group of friends/frenemies go to a Halloween party thrown by gothy outcast Angela and her friend played by Linnea Quigley (seriously, this movie has so many characters that I don’t know all their names) at Hull House, a former funeral home at the edge of town with a dark and murderous past. The characters vary from obnoxious assholes to a few goody-two-shoes (although two of them have the most sense to try to get out when things start to get rough in the beginning) to a few in-between characters. The cast has fairly decent racial diversity, I guess. At the party, they decide to communicate through a found mirror (not the “Bloody Mary” game, but something else) and one of the nice kids sees a demon and her death while everyone else argues and sees nothing.

You think that would get the ball rolling, but while this movie is only about 90 minutes, nothing much happens until minute 50. It is then that you really start to see the physical Evil Dead influence more than past just cribbing off of its plot. Night of the Demons and Evil Dead 2 came out within a year of each other, but I get the feeling that this movie was completed before Evil Dead 2. Otherwise, you probably would witness some attempts at gross-out humor. Any attempts made at humor in this movie mostly fail and are mostly centered around dudes unapologetically looking at Linnea Quigley’s ass.

*****SPOILER ALERT*****

One thing I will admit is that the makeup for Angela, iconic on the series video covers, is pretty damn creepy. I get uneasy if I think about it too much. It did pop in my head that night after watching it when I woke up in the middle of the night.

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