Compared to the ballsy, brassier days of 80s horror, fear flicks of the 90s that actually made it to the cinema usually seemed a bit more restrained than their direct to video cousins. Oh, I’ll grant you that various releases such as Peter Jackson’s Braindead and Ernest Dickenson’s Tales From The Crypt movie, Demon Knight where hardly slouches when it came to bringing the crazy, but more often than not, the game changers were more likely to be the brooding movies like Candyman, Ringu or the latest Silence Of The Lambs rip-off to come down the pipe. In comparison, the majority of the horror films that managed to sidestep the big screen tended to steer more toward the gonzo craziness of the previous decade, but all in all it seemed like this type of movie were slowly becoming passe.
I guess no one thought to mention this to Aussie/British filmmaker Brian Trenchard-Smith, who not only delivered a thoroughly unnecessary sequel to Kevin S. Kenney’s camp cult classic, Night Of The Demons; but also managed to overacheive his way into knocking out a follow up that’s arguably better than the original?
How did he manage this? I don’t know, blame the Devil, I guess.
Six years have passed since the massacre at Hull House where student Angela Franklin and a bunch of her class mates where possesed by demons, but while a bunch of mutilated bodies where carted out from the former mortuary, Angela’s wasn’t one of them. This creepy fact has haunted her timid sister, Melissa, ever since and her jittery demeanor has deemed that she carries the nickname of “Mouse” thanks to a trio of mean girls at the Catholic boarding school for troubled teenagers where she attends.
While mouse struggles to keep her head down, that trio of three girls made up of bully Shirley, vapid Terri and the actually rather nice Bibi, find themselves banned from the school’s Halloween dance, so Shirley comes up with a rather troublesome plan B.
Tricking her Gal pals, class himbos Johnny and Kurt and Mouse herself into travelling to Hull House to hold a party of their own, Shirley thinks it’ll be a gas to spray pentagrams on the wall and dance to 90s thrash metal, but after a bunch of weird shit goes down, the gang leave, but not before one of their number picks up some lipstick found on the premises – quick life hack: always take makeup from a haunted mortuary with the intention of applying it.
Anyway, long story short, Shirley does exactly that as soon finds that Angela’s evil essence dwells inside that enters her body with the eagerness of a demonic tapeworm. Now free of the boundaries of Hull House, Angela starts spreading her satanic influence through the terrified teens – however, standing her way is something even this twisted creature couldn’t even imagine: the rosemary twirling head nun, Sister Gloria.
While the original Night Of The Demons has it’s own cult following of appreciative acolytes, I’ve always only really thought that it was an OK Evil Dead rip off that balances a derivative plot by hurling in extra nudity and some inventive set pieces into the mix, and while Trenchard-Smith (director of the Nicole Kidman starring BMX Bandits, no less) obviously has no intention of inventing the wheel, he manages to recreate all the highs and lows of a low-budget, 80s schlocker so accurately, I’m not entirely convinced the director knew which decade he was actually in.
You name a horribly prevalent 80s horror trope and I’m pretty certain Night Of The Demons 2 has it in spades; a runtime mostly made up of people wandering around dark corridors, childishly broad performances, a gargantuan reliance on horniness being a sole defining character trait – and yet thanks to the far more respectable production values, it’s obvious that the director has included all these bad habits because he’s gleefully taking the piss.
Take the casting, for example. While we have a genuine before-they-were-famous role for Dodgeball star and Mrs Ben Stiller, Christine Taylor (someone even jokingly foreshadows her upcoming role in The Brady Bunch Movie by calling her “Marsha”), the vast majority of these so-called teens look so mature, again, you’re partway convinced that they were hired for that exact reason. Zoe Trilling’s slutty bully may vamp about the place like a sultry schoolgirl, but I’d also bet the farm that she’s somehow also got two kids, an ex-husband and mortgage payments stashed away somewhere. Elsewhere, we have the usual throwback, hormonal shenanigans that sees two of our male leads happily spying on the unfeasibly shapely female students as they undress and the movie amusingly shrugging off all this good natured sexual harassment as justice bit of a giggle while Merle Kennedy’s Mouse plays her character so shy, she sees to have regressed to a nine year old who easily looks twenty-five.
However, Blanchard-Smith knows that no one has shown up to this party for nuanced characters and a firm respect for women, especially when the first movie didn’t give a shit about any of this either – so instead he just ladles on the camp as much as he can until it’s time to unleash Angela, and – more importantly – special effects whizz Steve Johnson.
One of the standout aspects of the first film was some surprising kickass effects, which saw possessed lipsticks get inserted seamlessly into a woman’s nipple and various slavering, snaggle-toothed ghouls meet gooey ends thanks to the artistry of the frustratingly underappreciated Johnson and even though no one was expecting him to return, must less go balls out to top his work, the final thirty minutes of Night Of The Demons 2 prove to be something of a franchise highlight.
But when Johnson isn’t conjuring a pair of bare breasts suddenly morphing into a couple of grasping hands, an Evil Dead-style violation involving a lumpy, wriggling, demon-worm, a ghoul bouncing it’s own severed head like a basketball or a spectacular, climactic snake demon, then Blanchard-Smith is evoking the goofy spirit of Peter Jackson by having Jennifer Rhodes’ Mother Superior become a superior mother suddenly reveal that her martial arts prowess will certainly aid her in kicking arse for the lord (a Nunja, anyone?).
Those with a sizable intolerance for the sillier end of the 80s horror spectrum will no doubt roll their eyes at the movie’s many (and probably deliberate) flaws; but those of us that still revel in the glory days of 80s cheese will no doubt find that this 90s throwback will have them in seventh heaven… or is that hell?
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