NIGHT OF THE DEMON

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS AND A SENSE OF DEJA VU

Less than a week since seeing Unhinged and another old video nasty shows up on DVD. But unlike Unhinged, which eventually went through the BBFC unscathed, this one's still cut by a minute and forty one seconds of arm removal, castration, disembowelling and face burning (according the the Melonfarmers website). Happily, the end result isn't totally bloodless - unhappily, it just isn't terribly good and I doubt the missing footage would have elevated it to a lost classic of the era.

The basic idea of Night Of The Demon is that Bigfoot is alive and well and wandering the backwoods somewhere, ripping miscellaneous bit-part players into pieces in flashbacks dropped in at more or less random intervals. A college group decide to investigate and spend a long time traipsing through the forest in search of "Crazy Wanda", who local legends claim knows something about the monster. They find her, and they find the monster, but things do not end well in a surprisingly effective final reel shot almost entirely in slow-motion.

It says a lot about just what a fantastic and nerve-shredding work of genre genius this isn't, that only when updating my lists did I find I'd already seen this before, admittedly some years ago, and presumably it was the VHS reissue. (The DVD doesn't look any better as far as picture quality is concerned.) I see that back then I'd awarded it two stars and that still holds. It's a very silly movie, it's not particularly well done and only the final monster attack raises any interest at all. Like several other video nasties it's only noteworthy because it was banned a quarter of a century ago.

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