30 Jun 2012

Night of the Demon: Will's Review

I hate to rag on micro budget movies, getting a film finished and out there is no mean feat, but for some things there's no excuse; There are plenty of good actors who will work for guild minimum, and a coherent script costs no more to write than, say, Night of the Demon...

You see, the film starts at the end, and is told in flashbeck, a common enough method, only there are several flashbacks along the way - flashbacks within flashbacks, and while many of the scenes do not feature the main character (the one doing the flashing back) the sub-flashbacks almost all have no survivors, and in one case the guy doing the main story wasn't present when the nested (and witness free) flashback was recounted! So he is recounting the recounting  of a tail which no one could have known about and which he didn't even hear!


That might sound a bit nitpicky - and it might have been, but for the fact that the film is so disjointed that it is at times borderline incoherent. Sometimes chopping a back story into portions and telling out of order is an interesting way to have us share in a protagonist's confusion or gradual discovery, (Memento, A Serbian Film) or to hide an important fact until its reveal would be more dramatic (Sixth Sense) - here it's seemingly done randomly, as the entire back-story would have been better presented in one go as the films second act. It still wouldn't have been a great film (or even an good one) but it would have at least been easier to watch.

Spoilers follow, but I wouldn't recommend you sit through the movie unless you're some kind of freak with OCD that has decided he HAS TO watch the whole DPP list, so I wouldn't bother avoiding them:

Our focus is a group of anthropology students who are investigating reported Bigfoot sightings. It turns out that Bigfoot is real, and once raped a local woman, impregnating her with his mutant offspring. Her father, a priest who witnessed the rape, killed the baby, believing it to be of demonic origin. The woman has lived on her own in a cabin in the woods ever since, and seems to get used in some rape ritual carried out by her late fathers followers, who now worship the Bigfoot. Our students basically emotionally abuse this poor woman and exhume her child's grave(!), without giving it a second thought, until Bigfoot kills all but one of them. The survivor is declared insane.


Effects wise, the deaths are terrible, but the creature himself isn't too bad (for a film of it's age and budget):


It's so patchy and non-linear that it kind of defies review beyond this, So I present an equally patchy and non-linear collection of clips and comments:


Remember that they are in this woman's home:





"Nevermind" ???? NEVERMIND??? Really?


Bigfoot think's he's Jason now apparently 
(He uses an axe on a couple of occasions too):


Best Kill in the movie:
(also the best clip in VNAW history)

Mmmm, those clips make it look better than it is; sorry about that.

AVOID!

Body Count: 13
Boob Count: 1 pair
Dead Animal Count: 0
Most Memorable Kill: see above.


Please use the comments bellow only to comment on this post - to write your own review, please comment on the main post for this movie.

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