No Good Very Bad Movies Special: The one with Bigfoot

 

 

Title: Night of the Demon

What Year?: 1980 (copyright)/ 1983 (VHS release)

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: Guinnocent!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

While I’ve been considering the further course of this feature, I have tried out a few videos based on content I covered here. What that brought me to is a question I have frequently considered: Is there a point where a film is so incompetent that it no longer counts at the movie? As I have routinely said, this is why I can tolerate many/ most films at the actually incompetent end of the spectrum, especially from before about 1970 when a US theatrical release usually meant a minimum standard of mediocrity. Even at that stage, however, there was still a residuum of movies from people who either didn’t know what they were doing or really wanted to do something else. We already saw the fruits of this odd transitional period with Death Bed and The Crater Lake Monster. Now I have one more that technically came out in the 1980s. Here is Night of the Demon, a Bigfoot movie that’s on about the same level as the film of Bigfoot.

Our story begins with a grievously scarred man under psychiatric examination. Then we skip to a series of grisly lovers’ lane murder where the offender is the famed cryptid, alternating with college lecture on the mysterious primate Bigfoot. Soon enough, the professor gathers a group of students for an expedition to solve the mystery, without actually bringing guns. The party’s members quickly find themselves menaced by a mysterious creature, which doesn’t stop them from recounting more bloody, supposedly real murders that are all shown in enough detail to muddle how many of the students have been picked off in the present. But the real horror begins when they discover some wandering cultists and neurotic redneck girl with a dark secret: She once had a child with the monster, much to the indignation of her now-departed father. While the baby is no more, the “demon” is returning for his mate, and anyone in the way is cryptid food!

Night of the Demon was an independent film by director James Wasson and producer Jim Ball. The movie was reportedly filmed in 1979 and given very limited showings in a substantially different form, after which Ball added numerous sequences of violence/ gore and other explicit content. The film’s cast included TV/ character actor Michael Cutt as the professor and Melanie Graham in her only known film role as Wanda, the would-be mate of the Bigfoot. In 1983, the film in its current form was released directly to VHS in the US and elsewhere. In the UK, it received notoriety as a “video nasty”. Wasson directed a limited number of additional films in the 1980s, including several adult films. The film received multiple releases on VHS through the 1990s. Some later releases may be direct transfers from tapes. It was released on DVD in 2004 and on Blu Ray in 2021. As of mid-2022, it is available for digital purchase and rental.

For my experiences, I first caught wind of this from Brandon’s Cult Movies, and rented it for the viewing that led to this review when an upcoming reviewing was announced. I didn’t necessarily go in with the intention of doing my own review, though putting down a little bit of money for it certainly pushed me in that direction. What really got this rolling was the decidedly poor quality of the digital rental (definitely far inferior to the footage used for Mr. Tenold’s video). From the first moments, this was the kind of adapt-to-kaka experience that makes an impression all on its own (see Horror Express, Time Machine 1978, etc). It quickly became further apparent that this was exactly the kind of movie I had planned to cover with this feature and especially under the “Guinnocent” rating category, before I ended up going in other directions. I decided it was worth a slot while I sorted things out, so I started this review at the latest possible time.

Moving in, I cannot underemphasize just how far this falls short of any standard of professional quality. I suppose it still meets certain minimum standards that can’t necessarily be taken for granted (thanks, Creepers): The camerawork is acceptable and at times creative, the acting is more or less tolerable, and the concept and story at least rise above actual racism baked in by the likes of Ingagi. This is still hovering between amateurish and outright painful, and the frequent flashbacks (which are technically all within a flashback…) go a long way toward muddling a movie that is already short on coherence. The real question is if this is at least getting into “so bad it’s good” or at least psychedelically weird territory. Even on these terms, the movie is middling at best. Its most entertaining moments by far are from Graham, who definitely deserved a real career after coming out of this. She has a perfect deadpan delivery that can rise to snark and genuine anger, but this Southern Gothic style never quite fits the setting or themes of the movie. Then the obvious failure is the Bigfoot, ultimately shown as little more than a guy with a blaxploitation wig (okay, they didn’t quite sidestep the racism), which doesn’t even provide the intentionally comic quality of the likes of the beachball alien of Dark Star. Yet again, I must further protest that surrealism and “graphic”/ realistic gore do not mix.

Even with these complaints set down as self-evident, I spent the time between the viewing and this review trying to pin down just why this one felt wrong to me. The fundamental and still fairly obvious problem is that there is no sense of atmosphere here. This is partly because of otherwise bold decisions, particularly the numerous attack sequences that occur in broad daylight. These and certain other issues can be further allowed as due to limitations in both the original equipment and the quality of available copies. On a still deeper level, however, this is simply done the wrong way round, and it shows especially in the build-up. To begin with, despite the prominent role of gossip and campfire tales, the movie never really admits ambiguity whether or not Bigfoot is “real”. As a result, there’s no semblance of doubt that we will see the real thing, nor the building psychological-horror discomfort that could have paid off even if the creature never showed at all. On a closely related note, there’s no sense of legwork in the revelations that drive the story; things that should be hinted by chance and then hastily denied are instead repeated as casually as sports scores. And the real bottom line is that most of the film is focused on not just the least interesting characters, but the ones who don’t have any reason to be here at all.

Now for the “one scene”, I’m going with a kill that seems to turn up in every video about the movie. While I can’t fully discuss its exact context this long after a single viewing, I certainly had no trouble reconstructing the scene itself. Somewhere around the middle, we find a guy chopping wood on what appears to be a completely cloudless sunny day. He sets down the axe for a moment. Of course, when he turns back, Bigfoot is there, but the closeup is on the axe. He promptly takes a hit where his shoulder meets his neck. What stuck in my mind is the closeup of him grimacing in pain or general annoyance, in which he is clearly gripping the end of the axe handle with both hands. Somehow, the axe is removed, and we get another closeup of a wound comparable to what could be inflicted by a broken beer bottle. Just as priceless is his expression, which just looks confused. Then, of course, the camera zooms in on the axe as it falls again. Now, what really stood out when I thought about this is that there’s nothing to establish the details of the environment. This could be 10 feet from a road or in the middle of the deepest woods, factors that could explain both how Bigfoot caught the victim by surprise and why he attacked in the first place. But this is the kind of movie that doesn’t ask questions, which is how you get a scene like this.

In closing, all I really have to say about the rating is to repeat that this is indeed exactly what I had in mind when I came up with the “Guinnocent” rating. What really happened was that I had to change course for my own sanity, from actual garbage to the genuinely unconventional. This one was a reminder why I made that choice. Yes, there’s fun to be had just in pointing and laughing at what it does wrong, which ultimately just proves that it was never “that bad”. But by my refrain, once you get to this level, what you can say about one can be said about 10 or 100. The ones that remain worth analyzing are those with enough creativity to say something in a unique way. In that light, this movie is middle of the road, not as inept or obnoxious as some, but still well behind the likes of Plan 9, Dark Star or even Death Bed. It’s a fun place to visit, not so much to remain in long enough to fill out a feature. I am once again happy to move on.